I recently found this post in my drafts and realized I had never published it. Five years later, here it is.
After I graduated Dartmouth College, I worked at the college for six years. Somewhere in that time, I was backing out of a parking space in downtown Hanover when I backed into a car I didn’t realize was right behind me. I got out and began apologizing. I saw an older man getting out of the car and I began looking for damage while continuing my litany of apologies. I could see no damage and the man was saying that everything was fine, no worries. Then I glanced at the license plate. It was a New Hampshire plate that read, simply, “BASIC” I looked at the man again and realized, in a moment of mortification, that I had just backed into John Kemeny’s car. Kemeny invented the programming language BASIC along with Thomas Kurtz (who I’d met as an undergraduate when he was part of a competition to design a futuristic technology, my roommate Serge and I invented something we dubbed, “The Internet” not knowing that The Internet was an actual thing (we would within a year when Dartmouth connected to it)).
Kemeny assured me that everything was fine, gave me a genial smile, got back into his car and drove off. And that’s how I met John Kemeny.
BASIC turns 50 on May 1 [Like I said, this is a five year old post] and Dartmouth is planning a series of events to mark the occasion. BASIC was my own introduction to programming. I taught it to myself in high school on a friend’s Atari 400 and, later, my own Atari 800XL. My senior year of high school I wrote my own Mandelbrot Set generator. It took 24 hours to generate a single 384×192 picture (something my iPad can do in a fraction of a second today). As a freshman at Dartmouth College, I took my first Computer Science course using Real Basic, an update to BASIC. Soon afterwards I graduated to Pascal, 68000 assembly, and, ultimately, C. But it was BASIC that started it all. So, thank you Kemeny and Kurtz! And Happy Birthday BASIC!
I got into Pokémon a bit late in the game. Well, by the standard of now, not that late. The first game I played was Pokémon Pearl, a fourth generation game, set in the Sinnoh region. I started with a chimchar named Monty. The whole reason I started playing was because Marci was playing. She got her start with Emerald, a 3rd gen game on GameBoy Advance. In fact, that’s how she learned to read! But when Diamond and Pearl came out, they allowed for wireless interactions with others and she really wanted to play with me. So I got a DS and Pearl and we had a blast.
Over the years, we’ve continued to buy complementary games. Next it was Heart Gold (Marcy) and Soul Silver (me), Marci then did Platinum and I saw that round out, and then Black (Marci) and White (me). Marci got Black 2 but I skipped that one. Next came X (me) and Y (Marci), then Omega Ruby (me) and Alpha Sapphire (Marci), then Sun (Marci) and Moon (me), and then Ultra Sun (me) and Ultra Moon (Marci). With Let’s Go Eevee! I stopped. Mainly because I do not have a Switch and can’t really justify getting one for a single game. I may get on this fall when the 8th gen games Sword and Shield come out.
We’ve also played the card game over the years but only after we’d started playing Magic: The Gathering so it was a bit simplistic for us when we circled back around to it. It’s not a bad game and it does have some fun nuances to it, but it is hardly anywhere near as deep or strategic as Magic is. Of course, it’s also marketed to a younger audience. And there’s a not-bad Mac/iPad app for playing the card game that is fun to pull out ever once in a while.
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