Roland spent the whole morning helping me switch over to Merlin and ProDOS. He sat down at my desk and, before my eyes, wrote a nifty little program to automatically translate S-C’s weird Integer BASIC source files into regular text files.
It was kind of a thrill to watch. Roland is a hacker of the old school. He’s polite and unprepossessing in his dress and demeanor, careful about money and contracts. He drives a Saab with license plate SNABBIL. But under that conservative surface is a demon – a guy who will put his day job on hold for 72 hours and sit down and reverse-engineer an Apple II conversion of Tetris, just for the pleasure of it.
Watching him do what he did for me today, I felt a little of the old joy come flooding back. I’d almost forgotten the most basic thing: programming is fun. I’ve grown middle-aged these past couple of years. Roland is 23 but he’s still young at heart.
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“Roland is 23 but he’s still young at heart.” Now that made me smile…