Recalling the Age of Waiting
Henry Kim ·
In 5th grade, my parents bought me my first computer. It was an IQ 2000 model released by Daewoo at the time. While the revolutionary floppy disk was beginning to emerge, my reality was different. It was the so-called 'era of waiting,' where we recorded and decoded data analogically using cassette tapes. To load a single game onto the screen, I had to endure strange, screeching beeps that sounded like they would tear the speakers for a long time.
Around the time I had been learning the BASIC language at an academy for about a year, my uncle visited. My uncle pointed at the monitor and asked what on earth I could do with it. I proudly demonstrated how to display strings repeatedly on the screen or calculate simple functions. My uncle watched the screen for a moment, simply nodded, and then quickly left. Looking back now, from my uncle's perspective, the practical use of this expensive machine must have been the crucial point. Meaningless numbers or code displayed on the screen would have held no value in an adult's eyes.
But I had a much grander goal. The reason I dedicated myself to tedious BASIC coding for several months right after getting the computer was very simple: it was the intense desire to freely play computer games I had created myself at home. I scoured bookstores for all sorts of game-related books and painstakingly collected all the appendix codes published in computer magazines. Then I called a friend over, and we stayed up for five full days. We truly guarded the monitor and typed, catching only brief naps.
The side-scrolling jump game, completed after five days of intense struggle, resembled a clumsy Mario. However, my first project crashed with a fatal error just three minutes after it started running. It was an utterly futile ending, but at that fleeting moment when the code first ran, my heart pounded as if it would burst. Scanning thousands of lines of code for errors was almost impossible for an elementary school student. If today's AI, which can correct wrong code in a second and re-run it, had existed then, the result would have been perfect.
I liken it to the evolution of living organisms. If the 16-bit computers of that era were simple eukaryotic organisms, today's technology has continuously diversified and evolved, taking on the form of complex higher organisms. Now, with everything running so precisely and quickly, I sometimes deeply miss that romantic era. My first computer, which made my heart pound as I stared intently at the screen, played the tape, and listened to the crackling sounds of decoding. The music of that crude era, which was all the more cherished because it wasn't perfect, echoes in my ears today.