Ben's career in computing ended quickly after this. He left behind lots of little programs that spewed forth pointless yet oddly entertaining streams of text. For instance, one pearl called "The Nice Program," would inform the user, without fail, "I hope you are feeling okay." It is this kind of simple, elegant style which I sorely miss in most of today's popular software.

However I continued on, porting all my knowledge from the Pet onto the newly purchased Apple. Before long my programs contained graphics, music, and assembly language subroutines. I quickly generated a huge series of silly and violent animations, a bumper crop of games (most of which had clever title sequences but remain unfinished to this day), and a vast amount of mathematically based computer artwork. I treated the computer much like the piano - a tool in which one can transform abstract creativity into something easily understood and appreciated by others. Never once did I ever think to program anything "practical."

Around age 14 I massaged my towering ego by entering the annual Clarkstown South High School programming competition. Each year a bunch of kids would gather together and have a timed assignment, usually something like a bubble sort or guessing game. The first year I competed I blew everyone out of the water, finishing up thirty minutes before all the others. For my efforts I received a little medal the size of a half dollar which I prompty pinned to my bedroom wall.

At the next year`s competition I recall the fear in the other kids' eyes as I entered the room. "Oh, no," one kid said, as my presence meant a sure defeat for him and everybody else who dared challenge Matt, the Apple II wizard. Mwha ha ha ha. Another year, another medal pinned to the wall.

Somehow I got swept into taking part in a larger competition around when I was 16. The resident high school computer programming diplomat, Ms. Korn, drove me and another kid (whose name I can't remember for the life of me) to a school in an adjacent county where a hundred or so of the best young talent from downstate New York assembled for a big, bloody showdown.

Upon arrival we were herded into a lounge area where high school kids of all ages sipped on soda and munched on salty chips. Mmmm. Brain food. A congregation of young hackers usually doesn't make for an interesting social gathering, and for a while we sat around doing nothing, saying nothing, and smelling pretty bad, I'm sure.

Soon the silence was broken by a painfully archetypical dweeb, complete with button down shirt, pocket calculator (I'm not kidding), and hair all over the place. He shouted, "Okay. Let's face it. We're all nerds here. We all like Mel Brooks. Who here agrees Young Frankenstein was his best movie?" Thus began a huge debate, during which the finer points of Blazing Saddles were analyzed, and my favorite Brooks movie, The Producers, barely got mentioned.

Anyway, once all the computer stations and referees were ready, we got shooed into a huge gymnasium and handed a set of five programming assignments. The goal was to finish as many as possible within 60 minutes. The buzzer went off and the gym echoed with the clicks of 20000 keystrokes per minute.

The five programs proved no big challenge to me. Another bubble sort, another guessing game, a pared-down database, a text formatting trick program, and some simple math parser. I pretty much had it all wrapped up after fifty minutes, and spent the last ten minutes fluffing up the code to make these programs a little more "user friendly."

Some guy who looked like Judge Reinhold refereed my work. He sat down at my computer and ran the five programs one by one. The bubble sort worked of course, but then he had a problem with my guessing game. According to the explicit directions, I was asked to clear the screen at the beginning of the program, which in my haste I failed to do. Outside of that missing "HOME" statement, the game worked perfectly. It even beeped and flashed some colors when the user guessed correctly. I didn't get any credit for it.

The other screwup occurred in the database program, which asks for the user's name, and is to immediately reply "Hello, *User Name Here*." My version just said "Hello." Whoops. Well, I've been known to flake out on pointless details. Conceptually all five of my programs worked perfectly, some with extra features, but I had to be taught the lesson that knowledge and creativity isn't as important as following orders, so I got handed the embarassing score of 3 out of 5.

Only one kid officially got the full 5 out of 5. He got a free IBM system. Two kids got 4 out of 5 and held a tie breaker for a free TRS-80 system. I went home with nothing but a sour taste in my mouth. That was possibly due to all the soda and chips I consumed earlier.

I entered the next high school competition, and kicked royal ass, but it didn't feel right. Times were changing. My dad upgraded to an Apple IIe, but around this time other computer systems already pushed past Apple II's in popularity. I myself, in need of a fresh start, dropped a cool $1000 on an Amiga 500 system. Hey, it seemed like a good move at the time.

Today the Apple IIe still sits, unplugged, in the back office of my parent's house. The only reason my dad hasn't thrown it away is because there are about 60 floppy disks full of programs I wrote way back when which would be rendered useless without it. Thanks, dad.

Once, during a visit home many years back, I turned the old girl on and less than three hours later I finished programming a version of Tetris from scratch. You just can't get that kind of swift, easy interaction with today's overloaded operating systems. Well.. maybe you can, but I don't have three free months to figure out how. In the meantime, it takes but a few seconds to turn an Apple on, boot the disk, get a prompt, and be off on my own little trip down programming lane. For this the Apple II will always hold a special place in my carpal tunnels.