How I got here – Part 1

No, you don’t need to block this site from the kiddies.

As I think is clear from some of the other entries, I have the great privilege of working on Xbox 360 at Microsoft.
Now and then I just think about how I came to be where I am in life professionally. It’s been a bit of a twisting, but interesting, road.
I think I totaled up the money my parents spent on computers (not video games) and it was something like $5000 all together. Throw in another $50 in various change I didn’t return or swiped off the counter to buy floppy disks or magazines.
Hey, not a bad investment.
On the other hand, I remember saying something about video games to my Bishop when I was about 17 and he quoted me this verse from Paul:

1 Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

To be honest, I still struggle with that. Of course, who knew at the time that this was actually a way to make a living.
I had this conversation with a friend of mine the other day who is the head coach for a university golf team. He says his bishop told him the same thing once. <shrug>

But on with the show…

That first “console”
Stagflation. A lame Democrat president. Bad music. Worse clothes.
Nope! I’m not talking about 2009, I’m talking about the late 70s!
Sometime around maybe 1978 or so, our family got our first video game. This was a big deal at our house because my dad, like everyone’s dad at the time, was concerned that these games would ruin the TV and ruin their kids eyes. (The concerns that video games would make you rob liquor stores or turn into a dork would have to wait for Grand Theft Auto and World of Warcraft to be invented.) It was a Radio Shack/Tandy TV Scoreboard. We had the extra fancy model with the cool black gun and two shooting games in addition to four flavors of pong.
The knob on the left could detach from the main unit and was attached with a cord a few feet long for player 2.

I was about 10 at the time and this unit was a great choice as far as I was concerned because when we weren’t playing with it on the TV, I could play with the gun and use the game with all its knobs and switches as part of an imaginary airplane cockpit or some sort of space paraphernalia. The unit could run on batteries (the AC brick was optional) and the sounds came out of the game itself, not the TV. This made it all the better as a toy because it would happily beep and boop if you turned it on.

Not sure what ever happened to this thing.

Enter Atari
Christmas 1981. Reagan was president and the whole world was looking up. :-)
I wanted two things more than air that Christmas – an Atari 2600 and the Missile Command game.
Remember, wanting an Atari 2600 in 1981 was like wanting an Xbox 360 or PS3 now. They weren’t cheap.

I got up super early that Christmas morning and saw that Santa had indeed coughed up the goods. In the darkness I tried to connect it to the main TV, which was color. No joy! Not to be defeated, I went and got our little black and white “portable” TV and hooked it up there and that worked. (We did get the color TV hookup sorted out later on Christmas day.)

The 2600 “cyclops” version of Missile Command with it’s one silo in the middle seemed amazing.
I was thinking the other day about the cost of those games. Eventually I had quite a lot of them. While most of mine were bought on discount (go K-Mart!), I remember a couple that I got for full price of about $30 or so. Again, not that far from what you pay today, especially considering inflation.

One of my friends who also had an Atari got this crazy cartridge called BASIC Programming. It came with these little keypads with overlays and let you do things like flash colors on the screen. It didn’t seem very fun to me. Perhaps that was just my innate sense that this kid pronounced “GOTO” as “GOT OH” rather than “GO TO”.

One red letter event around the Atari 2600 for me was that in June 1983, 20th Century Fox shipped a rather lame game called “M*A*S*H”, based on the popular TV show. You see kids, even back then games based on TV and movie licenses were AWFUL.
Although I was a big MASH fan, I never had this game, but Fox, sensing they had just shipped a massive turkey, also announced the “$25,000 M*A*S*H video game design contest”. As a future Microsoft Program Manager, I set about designing the most amazing game – without realizing that it was light years beyond the capabilities of the hardware. I had diagrams and screenshots. I had about three pages of text describing the plot of “Radar’s Litter Jeep Rescue”. I boiled this all down to 50 words and dropped it in the mail on the last possible day. And I actually won something, though not quite $25,000. I won a Turmoil game cartridge. My prize came in the mail with a little orange photocopied strip of paper telling me I’d won 2nd prize. I still have that little strip of paper. Dude, that game would have been awesome.
I actually work with a guy who used to write games for Atari. It was sometimes a hellish place to work, and it was just a job for him, but I have to try hard not to have my eyes twinkle like a star-struck schoolgirl when he tells his war stories. I know. I know. I’m ashamed.

Unlike the Radio Shack game, I know what happened to this one. When I was married and lived in Spain (1990) I sold it to a Spanish dude at a garage sale with a bunch games. I didn’t really realize it at the time, but I sure hope he had a multi-system TV or it wouldn’t have worked at all.

Jon, meet programming. Programming, Jon
When I was in 6th grade, I was pulled into this “special class” of kids that was formed. We were going to have various enrichment experiences. The first one of these is that we went to Brigham Young University for several classes to learn about computers.
These weren’t just any computers, they were Commodore PETs. This was a mind-blowing acid trip of an experience for me and was clearly a formative experience.
I also remember my dad came to one of the classes because he was helping drive kids. My dad was a small businessman and he worked a lot. This wasn’t any kind of huggy kissy moment, but it stands out as one of the relatively few times he took time away from work to do something with me in the day.
Hey Payson Middle School your teachers all had big belt buckles, but good job on this program!!!!
In addition to, unknown to me at the time, defining my life’s work, it also set me up as definitely a “Commodore Man” for as long as that meant anything.
One of the things that made the Commodore’s cool is that they had game graphics right in their regular character set. This was good because this generation certainly didn’t have anything like bitmap graphics. But it was super easy to make a card game, a little spaceship or racecar going up or down the screen, etc.

A computer? At our house?
Sometime that summer, my dad combined with another kid’s dad who combined with some other people I don’t know and they bought a lot of Sinclair ZX-80 computers in some sort of auction. I guess I was about 12 at that time.
The Sinclair ZX-80 had 1k of RAM and no string arrays. Half of you are asleep now. Suffice it to say that it was tiny and it was crude. But it had BASIC and hooked up to a TV and tape recorder. This picture doesn’t show clearly how tiny it was. It was definitely smaller than this little Maxtor external hard drive I have sitting by my monitor right now.
I learned a ton on that machine, all in BASIC – including what it is like to run into the limits of memory or features like the no string arrays.
Wanting to impress my dad, I set about to create an inventory program for his business. This was my first stab at gathering and validating requirements, designing a solution for those requirements, cutting features, building demos, etc. Unfortunately, just based on the limits, I never got past the smoke-and-mirrors demo stage on that inventory program. (Again, setting me up for a career as a Program Manager - little joke there.)

Probably one of the strangest things I did with this computer was make music with it. How would you do that on a machine with no speaker and no audio output? Well, as it turned out, various instructions executing in the Sinclair changed the radio frequency interference it created. If you put a radio close enough to ZX-80, and then had a meaningless program just execute the right instructions in a fast series, you got some fuzzy, buzzy and yet FREAKIN’ AMAZING sound coming out of the radio. (Mind you I didn’t invent this. I read about it somewhere.)

Thanks Sir Clive!

We didn’t know it at the time, but, as we’ll see in part 2, this machine really paved the way for my future in an unexpected way.