My high school had a peculiar relationship with computers generally. There was the computer lab, and there was the one faculty member who knew a things or two about basic BASIC programming, but then there were others teachers there who hated computers and anything related to them. I had an English teacher who genuinely believed that a "word processor" was a sort of artificial intelligence program that you could provide with your assigned topic and it would print out a completed paper thereupon.

"HAL, give me eight to 10 double-spaced 8½x11 pages with one-inch margins on the poetry of the 19th-century American West, please."

"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

As such, any machine-printed assignment submissions received an automatic zero from her. (I got around that by printing with a daisy wheel printer. Remember those? The output looked just like a typewriter's!)

Now, going back a few more years, my middle school was fully invested in the mid-'80s dream of a computerized student utopia. In addition to a computer lab fully stocked with Commodore 64s, VIC-20s, TRS-80s ("no bloody A, B, C, or D," as it were), TI-99/4As, and a couple of smokin'-hot, cutting-edge Atari STs everybody clamored for time on, it had TRS-80 Model IIIs liberally scattered around the place and a few of the teachers had individual Apple //es in their classrooms. The trouble being that I don't remember any of us doing anything that was actually useful with any of those computers, except for... oh, wow, there's a memory within a memory.

OK, remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? For those of you who don't, they were nonsequential children's novels where you would make decisions and then be directed to different pages to see how your choices had affected the narrative. Sort of like playing Zork in hard copy. A page would say something like,

While you stand guard in the cargo bay, you hear a strange scratching noise coming from the ventilation duct on the other side of the room.

To stay at your post and wait for Mr. Kyle to relieve you, turn to page 28.

To use your communicator to report the unusual phenomenon to the Bridge, turn to page 44.

To go and investigate the scratching noise, turn to page 59.

And on page 59 you would of course die horribly and the book would invite you to go back and try something else.

(I don't think they ever had the Star Trek license, but frankly, Star Trek: Redshirt! would have been the perfect CYOA book theme, because they all had many endings like that.)

Well, there was another series of kids' books in print at around that same time, I don't remember what they were called, but they were like CYOA books, except that instead of decision gates, they had short BASIC programs at various points. The idea was that you would read to that point, key the program into your BASIC interpreter of choice, and based on the output you got, proceed to the next section of the narrative. There were even little tips about how you could optimize the programs for the idiosyncrasies of some of the most common/popular BASIC interpreters (I seem to recall the one for the Tandy Color Computer 3 usually required the most modification from the vanilla example in order for the programs to run properly).

I don't think those books ever really caught on in a big way, which is a shame, because they were a great gateway drug to programming. The CYOA/Which Way? Books format was huge in my demographic in the mid-to-late '80s, and so were little computers like the CoCo and the TI-99/4A, each of which had its own BASIC interpreter in the ROMs. (As I discovered, it was even possible with a bit of hacking to get most of the programs in those books to work on a Timex Sinclair 1000, if you had the optional 14K RAM expansion.) It really should've been a sure thing, but the fad fizzled out within a year or so.

During that year, though, almost everyone in the Nerd Stratum of the population at Millinocket Middle School could be found in the computer lab of a fifth period, either keying in a program from one of those books or sitting glumly at the VIC-20s, which couldn't run most of them, waiting for one of the other computers to open up. Even those of us who had our own computers at home (I had a //e by then) would usually save those books for lab time at school, then trade them around when we were done with them. It was a social phenomenon.

We also had better access to games in middle school. In high school the computers were always treated as SRS BSNS and playing games on them was a crime akin to playing kickball with that metal orb they use in the coronations of British monarchs, but in middle school, if we weren't screwing around on academic time and we were willing to either stick with the limited offerings available or provide our own software, we could play all we wanted with the school-owned hardware.

Mr. Brehaut, one of the science teachers, was known for being OK with people playing F-15 Strike Eagle on the //e in his room at lunchtime or after school, and there was a TRS-80 Model III in the library specifically set aside for students with free periods to play a small selection of games on (chosen, I suppose, because it had no sound hardware). You had your choice of Super Star Trek (the one from the big book of BASIC games, I forget what it was called, possibly The Big Book of BASIC Games), a deeply anonymized bootleg of Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure, or Taipan.

Lie Yuen's pirates, Taipan!

... Good joss!! They let us be!

I was briefly the hero of a jaded and novelty-hungry seventh grade for bringing in my copy of the Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for Apple, which provided a new stream of stimulation to those tired of F-15 Strike Eagle, offered a more cerebral pursuit for those not suited to the action-paced gameplay of F-15 Strike Eagle, and afforded Mr. Brehaut some relief from the sound effects of F-15 Strike Eagle. Good times.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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