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Eventually I got a part-time job writing gene-sequencing software for the biology department, using a 512K Mac with a 5 megabyte serial drive. “There was no programming of Macintosh as such in the beginning - you had to use Lisa Pascal to write Mac code. My roommate, Robert Shoemaker, bought a 128K Mac the day they came out, and between him, me, and Timmer, that thing was pretty much under 24/7 use.” The 1984 Macintosh commercial gave me goosebumps. “My classmates would talk about future computers, when we'd use a light pen to interact instead of a keyboard. “I dreamed of owning Lisa, though I had never laid hands on one,” Williams continues. “Caltech, back in 1983, had a big old Data General mainframe for student use,” he explains. “Awesome.”īy 1983, Williams had moved back down south, to study at the California Institute of Technology. “I was a poor kid, and my family could never afford a computer, but somehow one was always available to me,” he says. In retrospect, it was pretty cool of everybody to allow that.” Finally we could save our programs! I got the janitor to let me into the school every morning at 5:30 so I could work on the computers for a couple of hours before class started. “Later they got a couple of TRS-80s, and finally moved up to the Apple II, with its incredible floppy drive. “It had a whopping 2K of RAM, but amazingly we could persuade it to play decent games,” he muses. “The school computer was an Ohio Scientific 2P,” he recalls. Williams later moved north to Alaska around the turn of the decade, where he attended Delta Junction high school. Everything before that was, in comparison, a mechanical monstrosity.” It changed everything - it was cute and plastic and friendly. It played Breakout right out of the box - in color. “But I remember the day the first Apple II came. “The big seller at the Byte Shop was the IMSAI 8080,” he continues. Or maybe they just were geeks who recognized one of their own.” Maybe seeing a little kid on the computers made them less intimidating to the customers and helped sales.
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“The guys there were cool, and let me hang out for hours and hours. “After school I used to bicycle there and play with the computers, mostly playing Star Trek, Hunt the Wumpus and the like, but also diddling around in BASIC,” he says. Conveniently, Williams notes, it was located just “down the street”. Williams began his life with computers in the late 1970s, when a Byte Shop – the first franchise of personal computer retailers, originally founded in 1975 by Paul Terrell – opened in his home town of Tempe, Arizona.
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Today's Playing Catch-Up, a weekly column that dares to speak to notable video game industry figures about their celebrated pasts and promising futures, speaks to 1990 Mac strategy title Spaceward Ho! co-designer and producer and Delta Tao Software co-founder and president Joe Williams.