The Limits Were Pushed

The day my world exploded

I was 13 years old. It was late 1977.

I loved going to computer club with my dad. The meetings were getting popular—there would be 100 men and me. One day, someone stood up to demo the latest program he’d written. “Check this out,” he said.

You’ve got to remember, just a few months earlier, we were all writing low-res graphics programs. 40 pixels by 40 pixels. That’s all I thought existed. Then I started hearing rumors about something called hi-res—something our Apple II was supposed to be able to do. They said it could draw like a thousand pixels up and down as well as side by side. It was unimaginable.

At the same time, magazines started printing code that looked like it came from aliens. It was supposedly the only way into this hi-res world. To a BASIC programmer like me, it was impossibly complex—PEEKs and POKEs aimed at exact memory locations. You mean I’m supposed to care about the physical memory? You’ve got to be kidding me.

But I was intrigued. And I had the sense that the serious programmers—the older guys—were already writing like that.

At the computer club, I didn’t know what to expect when the lights went down and the next demo began. It was projected onto a giant screen in the darkened room. I had no idea I was about to see my first computer programmer rock star.

All of a sudden, we saw the thin outline of a little airplane. Just a stick figure. It slid across the top of the screen with the smoothest motion I had ever seen. Then a small round ball dropped from the bottom of the plane. The plane sped off while the ball arced down and to the right.

The room felt electric. I was in shock. I had never seen anything like it.

Then I noticed there was a little square building drawn at the bottom of the screen. The ball was headed straight for it. It hit.

And the house exploded into a million tiny pixels. They flew up into the air like the most beautiful fireworks I’d ever imagined. Ten trillion dots erupting outward—just like real life.

The men went wild. It felt like being at Dodger Stadium when Steve Garvey would hit a home run.

I had seen a miracle.