The first PC videogame I ever saw was a gorilla throwing a barrel at buildings. It was written in BASIC and came with our 286 back in 1989. I was really excited to learn how the monkey was drawn - out of the same ASCII blocks as everything else, obviously, but how? - and excitedly opened the file in a text editor.

It was a little overwhelming to my 7-year-old self to see just how many little subroutines and subprocesses were needed make the whole program work. It was a very complicated set of math processes, not unlike how a car engine is a very complicated set of physical processes. (I'd been helping with car repairs for a few years at this point, and rigged-up a pair of copper wires between the cable box and TV once when we only had 1 coax cable.)

Several years later, I was overjoyed to find the TI-82 calculators we were loaned in school could interpret the same BASIC commands, and happily started writing tiny utilities, competing with classmates for the coolest function, and joining debates about whether pre-programming the Quadratic Equation into a calculator counts as cheating on tests.

Despite setbacks like a lack of programming education in rural WA State in the early 1990s, that monkey throwing barrels planted the seed that made me want to write and understand software.