A short story by Martin Christen
It was 1980, and my father came home with an Exidy Sorcerer.
For most people, it was an unknown device – and it remained so, because there were no standards yet. An acquaintance from the village had got himself a Commodore PET, which looked more likely to become a standard, but also disappeared. The personal computer era was still in its infancy: 8080 CPUs, Z80 processors, the CP/M operating system just coming into existence. My father, an electrical engineer and always curious about the latest developments, had acquired the Exidy Sorcerer with its Z80 CPU – an exotic device, but for him and me, the gateway into a new world.
He showed me the basics of programming in BASIC, but I quickly outgrew him. Soon I was programming things he himself no longer fully understood — helped along by the fact that, thanks to a broken leg, I already knew how to touch-type. One day, I discovered that the Sorcerer’s 8-bit character set contained a number of freely programmable characters. I designed a series of them so that their sequence of images produced a little worm contracting and stretching, then wrote a small BASIC program that displayed these characters on the screen in exactly the right sequence, so that a worm appeared to crawl slowly from the bottom to the top.
When I showed my father the program, he clapped his hands in delight. He was thrilled – not just by the result, but by the fact that I had already dug so deeply into the technical peculiarities of the system that I had managed something like this as a beginner’s effort.
It was the beginning of a long passion.
After my apprenticeship as an electromechanical engineer at Sprecher & Schuh, I worked for a few months at Indumation AG, a subsidiary of my training company, which developed and sold electronics for warehouses and industrial control systems. I already knew that after my compulsory military service I would be starting a degree in computer engineering – this interlude was my first step into the professional world of computers.
It was my dream world. On one hand, software was being built for fault-tolerant TANDEM computers, all of whose components were duplicated and switched over automatically in the event of a failure. On the other hand, for controlling high-bay warehouses, cranes, and horizontal conveyor systems, in-house industrial computers were used – PLCs, Programmable Logic Controllers, with multiple slots for input and output modules.
During a quieter period between two projects – as a hobby, in a sense – I inserted a dozen 8-output modules side by side into one of these PLCs and wrote a small program in 8085 assembly language that linked the eight LEDs of each module into an 8×12 matrix. With this, I could display the numbers from 00 to 99, and set them counting through in sequence with a counter program.
When I showed this to a colleague, he clapped me on the shoulder: «You’ve just proved your genius as a computer specialist. Every computer science student should have this as one of their first assignments.»
I accepted the praise with a smile. To me, it had simply been what I always did: dive deep, try to understand how something works, and then find out what else is possible, what no one has tried yet.
I completed my degree in computer engineering at the HTL – a technical college roughly equivalent to today’s universities of applied sciences – in 1985. As a graduation tradition, our class put together a magazine – with photos, anecdotes, portraits of the teachers, and all sorts of episodes from our years of study. Together with a fellow student, I sat down several times to collect amusing snippets to scatter throughout it.
At some point, he said to me: «Martin, I’ve just noticed that you often make fun of yourself here. You’re writing down incidents where you didn’t come off well, and laughing about them. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.»
I was taken aback. I had never thought about it that way. I simply saw the comedy in the situations I had been part of – and felt they were worth a laugh. He, on the other hand, felt these were laughs at my expense, and that they might cast me in a poor light.
We saw it very differently. And perhaps we still do.
It doesn’t matter what other people think of you, what matters is what you think of yourself… because those people don’t really know you.