In the spring term of 1986, my first Foundation computer class was kind of a disaster.
There weren’t enough Commodore 64 computers for everyone, so I got stuck with an old VIC-20. It had fewer colours, bigger, chunkier characters on the screen, and a tape datasette for storage. Everyone else had 5.25 inch floppy drives on their C-64s, and I had a frickin VIC-20 with a frickin datasette. My computer was five years behind everyone else’s and I figured that my computer class experience could only go downhill from there.
The instructor gave each of us a photocopy of an article from “BYTE” magazine that had a hundred lines of BASIC code to type in. The end result was supposed to be an animated image of a chunky lighthouse with a flashing yellow beam of light.
By the end of the afternoon, a few people had flashing lighthouses on their screens, but all I had was some blinking yellow line and some chunky dots that Piet Mondrian might have enjoyed. It looked like shit and left me feeling completely demoralized about my introduction to computer graphics. Looking back, it seemed like the lab was over-booked and that lesson had been hastily prepared. I don’t think there’d been any real instruction in the programming language other than “here’s the editor, so type all this code in”. It felt abysmal.
Afterwards, I sat on a bench in the Foundation hallway, re-reading the photocopied article. My determination remained: I wanted to understand how the code worked (For-Next loops and all that) and I tried to memorize all the BASIC character codes that looked like “Chr$(13)”. Each number in parentheses represented a different shape, symbol, or alphanumeric character that could be displayed on the screen. Each key had numerous characters available if you held down the right combination of keys or knew which character code to use.
The BASIC code was pages and pages of statements to draw the shapes using characters that looked like coloured blocks, followed by statements that redrew certain sections of blocks to approximate an animated motion effect. I got the idea, but the code was all greek to me, even though I knew that it held the secret to how those animations were supposed to work. It was a cryptic new language for a mysterious new sytem.
Even though I’d had a miserable introduction to making computer-based animation, I felt like I had to persist to get myself past confusion and mystery and onward to some kind of understanding and mastery. It was something I didn’t understand, but I wanted to.
Later in the term, as I got more time in the college’s C-64 computer lab, I taught myself BASIC programming and spent a lot of time using a Koala Pad to draw onscreen. The Koala Pad was a small drawing tablet with a plastic stylus that made the act of drawing on a computer feel much more natural.
I typed in other BASIC programs from other magazines, learned more, and gained new confidence. Soon, I became fascinated by glowing pixels, shining out in the dark. My ability to get things I wanted to appear on a computer monitor started with those early, crude C-64 explorations. Electronic technology excited me, and projected light really began to feel like it might be my natural medium.
Some time after, our Dean of Education, Tom Hudson, took me aside to tell my about a TV project he was shooting at the Knowledge Network studios at UBC (Knowledge Network was our province’s public television service). Tom described the goals of his TV series, called “Colour”, and asked me if I’d like to be part of the section on computer-based colour. Basically, I’d be using a Commodore 64 to help demonstrate how micro-computers render colour. It sounded very exciting to me and I was amazed at the idea that I was being recruited to be part of an educational TV program!
Some weeks later, I received a subpoena at my evening dish-washing job. I was summoned to appear in provincial court in Victoria to testify as a witness in a court case. Basically, I had to bow out of Tom Hudson’s Colour project to go to court in Victoria. I felt awful telling Tom about it, but what could I do? I missed a chance to take part in the Colour project and it really disappointed me.
(I promised a relative that I wouldn’t say much about this incident, to avoid embarrassing them.) Suffice to say, on the day at court, I met my sister at the courthouse in Victoria, we testified on the stand and were home again in Vancouver that night. It was nerve-wracking and disruptive, but I knew it was necessary.
All the same, I felt that I’d been forced to miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime educational opportunity. I was so disappointed in losing out on being part of a unique TV project. It was just dumb bad timing, the coincidence of dates, but it burned me up. It made me feel as if my life’s past troubles just kept interfering with my positive new opportunities. My past seemed to keep messing up my future.
