Yeah, I guess they sold quite a few VERY expensive machines in that neighborhood, and there were raging arcade game controversies going along at the same time, so seeing kids do 'productive' things with computers - like program simulated galactic war games - seemed like a responsible thing to do.
In my case, that guy gave me a raging passion for computers that has led, 40 years later, to ridiculous things happening.
The "Computer Age" place stuck around for only a few years afterwards .. the cognescenti of my hacker club at school discovered TANDY and Dick Smith as places to test new hilarious routines .. and, meanwhile, some of us got modems.
Good times. I think my Mum still had that floppy disk around in her memoirs, somewhere. Something about how she righteously retrieved it from an old, much loathed, school principle, who had zero idea what it was, or what it would ever mean for the world that a 10 year old kid had simulated galactic war games on his person, in lieu of math homework, or so.
Anyway, yeah. Great sales guy, would time-travel and witness again.
It really was the best era, and lots that I can relate to in your story there, though I was on the far opposite side of the world in snowy cold Edmonton, Canada.
And re: the principal, here's a great quote from my grade 3 report card which I get a kick out of, and use to help my kids feel better about their report cards:
"XXX's work is very untidy. More work is needed in cursive writing. His journal entries are computer programs."
I wish I could find that teacher today and send her a copy of my job offer from Google from 10 years ago.
I was a teenager visiting Computer Age on the weekends at the same time. It was a time when computer access was still scarce and you hung around shops and went to conventions just to get access to one. Some friends used to go to the tandy store each afternoon after school and type in a lunar lander game they had written on the tandy 100 for sale. Each day the shop would turn of all the machines and wipe the game so they would go back up the next day and type it in again.
