Taking a slight break from music videos and such, this video popped up in my feed and I was intrigued. I love tech history beginning with documentaries like Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires (1996) by Robert X. Cringely, and books like Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. 

My own nerd life didn’t really begin until I had graduated from college, was working on a Masters Degree in Theology and wanted a better way to write papers than what I had been trying to do with my trusty ol’ manual typewriter. I had been working for the phone company for five-years and my then-wife told me about something called “income-averaging” that would get me a huge income tax refund and that was dedicated towards my first personal computer, a beautiful Kaypro 4-84 that I purchased for $2,417.81. 

That was the beginning of my journey into … personal technology, small computers, who knows. All I know is that the folks who produced my Kaypro and the Kaypro 10 that I bought the next year went out of business in 1990 and I became a technology orphan. That forced me to learn how support myself, figure out what to do when something didn’t work and eventually take out my Phillips screwdriver and work on the stuff myself. None of this has anything to do with the documentary on how the Basic programming language came to be, but it’s much in the same spirit of chronicling how something, like my career in technology, which started with me wanting to write, ended up somewhere completely unexpected, like teaching robotics to middle school students. Wow, that last sentence really trampled all over the analogy… Anyway, enjoy the documentary.