How I got started in Computers (part 1)

I've recently read some blogs from people telling the story of how they got started in computers.  I decided join in and organize my thoughts on the subject.  After I started writing down my thoughts, I decided to break this up a little bit.  My first few computers fulfilled different things in my life that I feel are working mentioning.

Our first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000.  It was a little computer that only had a keyboard and hooked directly to the TV.  It had no storage outside of the on-board RAM, so you had to save your programs to a cassette tape as audio.

We had a vanilla tape recorder that we connected to the computer, and then we would record the audio of the program to cassette.  I remember a few times playing an unlabeled tape on our stereo and discovering it was a program when the sound was all beeps and fuzz. 

Running an existing program involved reversing the process: hooking up the cassette player and playing the audio while the computer "listened" and converted all that sound back into a program.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't work.

Years later I learned that some radio stations would broadcast programs over the air.  You would record the audio off the radio and then load the program from the tape you recorded.  I'm not sure if any of the radio stations near me did something like this or if I was too young to know it was occurring.  Either way the thought that this was possible fascinates me.

My brother and I had no games or programs to speak of other than a book that I believe he found in a store.  It was called "51 Game Programs for the Timex Sinclair 1000 and 1500", and it was simply a list of programs and the code you had to type in to get it to work.  Some of them were small, but naturally all the cool looking games were pages upon pages long.  My brother and I would lie on the floor and take turns typing in those programs.  I remember a car racing game that we just couldn't get right – the picture showed the road with twists and turns, but our version only showed the road as straight as an arrow.  We suffered a lot over that program – multiple failures trying to save to tape, retyping to try to get the program right, etc.

Coincidentally I still have that book on my shelf!  My mother tried to sell the computer at a garage sale sometime in the mid-80's and some woman begged my mother to sell her JUST the book (she didn't want the computer).  My mother refused and for some reason my 10-ish old mind decided I would keep the book.  I'm so glad I did, it proudly sits next to all my other computer books on my bookshelf.

A few years ago I thought I had an "Ah-ha!" moment when I remembered the entire audio-saving technique of the Timex.  I thought it might be useful for communicating with a group of others at a ski resort.  This was before smartphones, but I thought you could replace those little walkie-talkies people carried around with one that also had a small keyboard.  Then you could leave a text message using those devices using the same audio bandwidth the radios already used.