My first computer — which I believe was the first computer in town, and may have been the first in the county — was an Exidy Sorcerer. I’ve got a clipping of a newspaper article from 1978 about these new-fangled computers that you could have at home that includes a photo of me, at 3, playing Hangman on it. My mom recently canceled her subscription to that newspaper, because the new-fangled home computers killed it.

The Sorcerer was a pretty slick machine for 1978, though you’ve probably never even heard of the company that produced it. 2 MHz Z80, 48kB RAM… the top 16kB of its address space was used for ROM packs, which were built into 8-track tape cases. The only one of the ROM packs we actually had was the Sorcerer BASIC interpreter that came with the machine, though. It also came with a BASIC programming manual, because the only way you were getting software for it was to type it in yourself from the BASIC listings in magazines. I taught myself to program out of that manual.

The original storage was a cassette deck, though Dad later built an S-bus floppy drive unit for it from a Heathkit. Two 5.25″ floppy drives — single-sided! I was so confused when we got our first IBM-compatible (a Zenith 286) and I could no longer flip the floppy disks over to use the other side. The floppy disks let us boot CP/M on it, so we could run WordStar. I kept using WordStar up until 1996, when I switched to Linux and a text editor called joe, which is largely based on WordStar, and which is still my editor of choice to this day. (I can use vi if I have to, but… ^]^]^]:q!)