My first computer in 1977 that booted up into BASIC - Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor).
It had 8k of memory, and I paid a whopping $400 for the 32k memory expansion module. The original PET cost me $800 used.
My first game was a horse racing / betting game, reflecting my Mom and Dad's penchant for the ponies (OTB, you owe me big time ;)
IIRC, I could only use graphics characters if all the letters were uppercase. My game had 3 horses to a race that ran from left to right based on a random number of which horse and how many spaces it moved.
I generated a random number of 0 to 3 for each of the horses with:
100 FOR R = 1 TO 3
110 X = INT(4 * RND(1))
120 NEXT R
130 SPC(A)
You could bet based on fixed odds, and the payoff would show at the end of the race (bet * odds).
My memorable joy was watching my Mom and Dad rooting at the 9 inch monochrome green screen! I was hooked on coding, but only at home. I rarely worked coding for a living.
It booted up into PET BASIC, and aside from some PEEK/POKE limitations, you could access all of it. People hooked up joysticks later to the user port, and hacked speakers or buzzers for sound.
I loved the Datasette (cassette tape drive) for storage! You had to put the tape in the drive, instruct BASIC to LOAD "PROG", and then it would prompt you to hit 'PLAY' on the Datasette. I think you then typed RUN "PROG" when if finished loading.
I would go to the store where I bought it in NYC, and they had like 4 or 6 plastic bags with cassette tapes in them and a one sheet or a few sheets of instructions. I wanted FORTRAN or APL, but APL was not available on my PET.
I would love a real LISP Machine, even an historical one for the pleasure of it really being 'turtles all the way down'! I love Lisp more than BASIC, but PET BASIC will always have a special place in my heart, and in the cobwebs of my mind.
I saw a Commodore PET at that time in a local store. In school I then got access to a Commodore CBM 3032, which was a more robust model of the PET. It had a better keyboard, for example. Booted into BASIC, too.
They were beasts. I left mine at my parent's house, and was hoping to reclaim it, but my cousin John had borrowed it and sold it years later. I should have kept tabs on it!
When I look at the video of Kalman Reti running Symbolics Lisp Machine in an emulator [1], I am still blown away by how much more sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing it was compared to my PET or the Apple ii. The difference seems almost asynchronous, like time-traveler tech.
How you could just drop in to any system library, or even the kernel, and use the same language, Lisp, to modify anything live is astounding. A lot of people have dismissed any talk of how great LISP Machines were as a bunch of nostalgia, but I don't think any of them have watched 15 minutes of somebody operating in that environment. You can't look at it, and keep a straight face when talking about how great the Apple ii was or the Lisa for that matter later on.
The demo by Kalman is pretty cool. Over a period of a decade there were many high-end applications for the machines. The base system could cost from a few ten thousand to $250000 for full set up used in the TV and Broadcast industry: machine, console, software, color screen, huge amounts of memory, large disks, video tape recorder, graphics co-processor, graphics tablet, ... That's far away from the home computers from Commodore.
