I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a squat and angular box that glowed in the corner. “You gotta try this,” he told me, and handed over a piece of paper on which he’d handwritten a program.
I plunked it out on the PET’s chunky mechanical keyboard.
10 PRINT “CLIVE”
20 GOTO 10
I typed “RUN,” hit Enter, and watched as my name spilled down the screen in bright green-on-black text, over and over.
