I travelled to Mountain View, CA for orientation this week. It was a pretty intense week at Google headquarters, but I managed to find 45 minutes of free time to visit the Computer History Museum there. On my whirlwind tour through the facility I was delighted to find a Hyperion portable computer!

This is the type of computer that I originally learned to program on. My mum taught me how to load, modify and run programs in BASICA, particularly a program we had which could play music through the PC speaker. One particular summer that I remember, we brought the Hyperion to the cottage in Ompah and Emily and I had fun changing the code of that program to play various songs that we liked.

I also used the Hyperion to author several editions of a newspaper for my Grade 8 class with my friend Sean Tull. During that process I learned the essentials of spreadsheet manipulation (using Lotus 1-2-3) and word processing (using WordPerfect 2.2, if I recall correctly).

We had a few rudimentary video games for the Hyperion. One challenging one that I remember was called Sailing ...an adventure in the Bermuda triangle. It was a simple sailing simulator, with deadly whirlpools, motor boats, and a mysterious cloud that would randomly envelop your ship and bring you back to the start. I never completed it. I'm not sure if it is even possible.

Anyway, it seems fitting that at the start of the next chapter of my career, I got a chance to reflect back on where I started.

Technical Details: This photo was taken with my Samsung A5.