So there I was at a Radio Shack in the late 80s. Yeah, you remember Radio Shack, right? There's not a lot of them left anymore. You go in and you can nerd out on all the circuits and all the electronic gadgets that you might need. It used to be a booming retail operation, but they've kind of faded. And I think they started

fading well before they figured out they were fading. But that's not the point of today's podcast.

I was in a radio shack in the late 80s. I was in high school. Now, I was a bit of a geek in high

school. It was a strange mix. I was on the basketball team and I programmed computers.

I couldn't figure out which group to sit with at lunch. But I was in this reader shack and I was

playing around on one of the first computers they had it sitting out on display and it was turned on.

And I just was programming. I'd learned some basic programming. And I was sitting there for about

15 or 20 minutes. I just programmed out a little program that wrote my name on the screen.

Yeah, that's right. That's how computers used to work. If you just wanted to write your name on the

screen, it was about 25 lines of code to create the lines needed to write my name. And when I hit the go button and

ran the program, it would write my name on the screen, and then it would erase it. And then it

would write it on there again, and then it would erase it. I thought it was pretty cool.

My brother was there with me. I think we may have had some other friends with us. I can't remember

for sure. But there it was. Boom. But no sooner had I completed the program, the sales rep came over,

hit the power switch and looked me right in the eye and said, these are not toys. You need to leave the

store. Whoa. All right. Maybe you could have told me in the last 20 minutes at some point. I was just having

fun. It wasn't like I was writing, you know, Radio Shack Stinks on the screen. I was just putting my name on

there, and it was easily reset without having powered off the entire thing. He could have come over

and said, hey, how about you make it say something else that supports the store?

Can you program something else on there?

That's kind of cool.

He could have encouraged me.

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