A Dragon 32 in the classroom

A classmate brought a Dragon 32 into the classroom one morning. I don't remember their name any more, but I remember the box. Beige, chunky, a keyboard that felt like it had come off a typewriter. They'd typed a listing out of a magazine and got it running, which at the time was an act I would have put somewhere between juggling and stage magic. I stopped listening to the teacher for the rest of the day. If you've seen any of the 80s-homecomputer documentaries, that moment is the shape of the whole genre in miniature. One machine, one friend, one afternoon, and then a long campaign of persuasion at home.

Mine took weeks. My dad was a secondary-school teacher, which made him both the person most likely to be swayed by "it'll help with your work, Dad" and the person most likely to see straight through it. So I spun yarns. A proper campaign of them. There'd be a printer, I said. We could type his lessons up on it. Worksheets. Handouts. The mock papers that were at that point being reproduced on a Banda machine that turned everyone's fingers purple. I was nine. I had never typed anything in my life. My dad wasn't having it on the first pass, or the second. He'd come round most of the way by the fourth, which is how an Acorn Electron — not the BBC Micro I'd asked for, BBC Micros being dear — ended up in our house. Same family, smaller wallet. The Electron's MODE 2 ran slower than the B's, the keyboard rattled, and a handful of *FX calls that worked on my friend's machine just sat there on mine. None of it mattered. It booted to BASIC and it was ours.

There's a detail I never quite got over, and it's the part of the story my younger self didn't see coming. The printer arrived about a year later. An Epson dot-matrix on tractor-fed paper, howling like a sawmill when it ran. I had spent weeks arguing that printer into the house. I then spent the next two years of Sundays typing up my dad's lesson plans on it in VIEW, saving to cassette, cursing when the cassette didn't load, re-typing. The yarn that had got the Electron in the door became the tax I paid to keep using it. I had, at nine, successfully negotiated a contract without reading the small print. That was in fact the first piece of engineering I ever did, and it was inbound rather than outbound.

In between the lesson plans, I played the games. Chuckie Egg. Repton. Type-in listings from Electron User that came back with BAD PROGRAM more often than they ran. The ones that did run were, as a rule, worse than games I had saved up pocket money for. That was the joke the magazines were in on and I wasn't. I kept typing. Somewhere in the middle of a wet Saturday copying pages of DATA statements, the shape of what a program was shaped like started to land. Games got me in the house. Programming is what kept me there.

Forty years on, the hook has not worn off. I've been a coder ever since, and I still prefer the word "coder" to "engineer" because it's the one that was on the cover of the magazines. The tools have moved more than I'd have believed in 1986 and less than anyone predicted in 2023. I have Claude Code open on one monitor now and Cursor on the other, and neither of them is the point of anything I make, the way the Electron's BASIC prompt wasn't the point of anything I made back then. They're fast typists who can hold an opinion. Partners in crime is the phrase that keeps coming to mind, and I think it's honest: not because they do the thinking, but because they'll think out loud with you until the plan sharpens.

The thing that still catches me out is that they argue. An agent will push back on a spec it thinks is weak, and an afternoon of that feels closer to two kids reading a magazine over each other's shoulder than it does to anything a keyboard-and-compiler workflow ever produced. I am still the annoying one in the room: about quality, about names, about whether a module earns the space it takes up. They are the ones who can turn "alright, let's try it that way then" into running code before my coffee goes cold. They disagree. I disagree harder. I still get there.

My dad's printer is in a landfill somewhere. The Electron is in a loft I no longer own. The habit of booting a machine to a prompt and asking it what it would like to make is the one thing nothing has been able to kill, and I've tried. Every terminal I open still feels like someone has just handed me a keyboard and asked me what I'd like it to do.