The Magic of Discovery: Early Computing Memories

Magic rarely announces itself. Sometimes it lurks in the most mundane places - like a Radio Shack franchise across from a video arcade in a suburban Florida mall.

My first brush with computing hardly seemed magical at all. At the Pinellas County Science Center, sixth-graders gathered around a greenbar IBM terminal where older kids crafted ASCII art of Snoopy. Between learning to make recycled paper with potato mashers and steam irons, I remember thinking the computer seemed "kind of interesting, but also kind of dumb."

The real revelation came later at Pinellas Square Mall, with its chocolate brown anodized aluminum and blonde brick facades. It was 1977, fresh off the summer of Star Wars, when I encountered a mysterious typewriter-like device with a pristine copy of "BASIC for Beginners" beside it. Everything gleamed with newness. The demonstration program created digital snowflakes that cascaded down the screen - a primitive preview of what would later become The Matrix's iconic animation, though none of us could have known that then.

"What can you do with it?" I asked the clerk, who couldn't have been more than twenty-one.

"Anything you want, with the right peripherals," he replied with the casual confidence of someone who had glimpsed the future.

"Can it make me lunch?" I shot back, with all the smart-aleck confidence a sixth-grader could muster.

"Yes, if you connect it to the right equipment," he answered patiently. Rather than dismissing my sass, he took the time to explain what peripherals were - printers, motors, sensors - and how computers were really just very good at following instructions, step by step. In that moment, the abstract concept of computation began to connect with the physical world.

That exchange sparked my first real understanding of the Turing machine's promise - the idea that with enough time and the right connections, these machines could transform abstract instructions into physical reality. It was computational compound interest: small, simple operations building upon each other toward increasingly complex possibilities.

My first program was hardly sophisticated:

10 PRINT "SHIT"
20 GOTO 10

The TRS-80 dominated my computing world for years until I discovered Olsen Electronics at Tyrone Square Mall. There, amid surplus speakers and mysterious nixie tubes, stood the futuristic Commodore PET with its chicklet keyboard and cassette tape drive. The Altair was there too, though by then it seemed almost quaint.

Over the next decade, I dove deeper into the machinery of computing - compilers, linked lists, databases. Even in college courses on IBM 390 Assembler and Logic Design, I recognized that the machines themselves could shoulder much of the cognitive load. While classmates reveled in writing microkernel assembler, I gravitated toward higher-level abstractions and conceptual programming.

The era of "goto-less top-down coding" was in full swing during my university years. But even then, the most interesting aspects of programming weren't in the mechanical details of implementation, but in the patterns of thought that could be expressed through code. The magic wasn't in the individual instructions, but in their orchestration toward larger purposes.

The Forever Moment

We don't always recognize pivotal moments as they happen. That day in the mall could have been forgotten - just another Saturday afternoon amid countless others. Yet it persists in memory while thousands of seemingly more significant days have faded completely.

Why? Perhaps because it represents a fundamental shift in understanding - the first glimpse of a door that would never close again. The realization that computation could bridge the abstract and physical worlds fundamentally altered how I perceived reality itself.

I've spent the decades since then exploring various manifestations of this connection - from enterprise search engines and semantic networks to today's large language models. Each advancement has built upon that initial insight: with the right instructions and connections, computation can transform abstract patterns into meaningful physical action.

Lessons From The Clerk

What strikes me now about that Radio Shack employee was his patience and vision. He didn't dismiss the smart-aleck kid or offer a patronizing answer. Instead, he took my question seriously and expanded my understanding. He connected abstract computation to practical reality in terms I could grasp.

This remains the essence of good technology education: meeting people where they are, taking their questions seriously regardless of sophistication level, and expanding their conceptual frameworks rather than simply delivering facts.

That clerk probably forgot our interaction by closing time. He couldn't have known he was planting seeds that would grow into a lifelong passion and career. But that's often how influential moments work - the party who feels the impact rarely forgets, while the one who created the impact moves on unaware.

Yesterday's Magic, Today's Reality

The magic that felt so novel in that 1977 Radio Shack has now permeated every aspect of modern life. The "right peripherals" that clerk mentioned have proliferated beyond imagination - sensors in our pockets, cameras that recognize faces, speakers that respond to voices. The computational compound interest has accumulated at rates that would have seemed impossible then.

What once required dedicated enthusiasts huddled around mall displays now happens invisibly billions of times per second all around us. The snowflakes that cascaded down that TRS-80 screen have evolved into immersive virtual worlds and generative AI that can produce images, music, and language indistinguishable from human creation.

Yet I wonder if today's children still experience that same moment of revelation - that instant when the abstract potential of computation suddenly connects to physical reality in their minds. Do our sleek, polished devices, working their magic behind glossy interfaces, still provide those epiphanies? Or does their very seamlessness hide the transformative power underneath?

The Enduring Wonder

In today's world of AI assistants and ambient computing, the raw relationship between instruction and action can become obscured. As interfaces become more intuitive and outputs more sophisticated, we risk losing sight of the fundamental magic: small, simple operations combining to accomplish complex tasks.

This is why I still find value in teaching children the basics of programming, not because everyone needs to become a programmer, but because understanding the principles of computational thinking provides a framework for approaching problems across all domains. It's about recognizing patterns, breaking complex tasks into manageable steps, and seeing how simple instructions can combine to create emergent complexity.

That day in Radio Shack wasn't just about encountering a computer; it was about glimpsing the potential of human-machine partnership. It was seeing how our abstract thinking could be extended and amplified through computational tools. That insight remains as relevant today with our sophisticated AI systems as it was with that first TRS-80.

The specifics of technology will continue to evolve, but the wonder of that discovery - the moment when the abstract becomes concrete, when potential becomes real - that's a magic worth preserving and sharing. It's the spark that turns curiosity into creation, questions into exploration, and passing interest into lifelong passion.

Somewhere, in some ordinary place, someone is experiencing that spark right now. And who knows what worlds they might build from it?