Originally I programmed in Rascal, a language developed at Reed College which was sort of a cross between C and Pascal. I got a Mac and began teaching myself to program on it. The user interface was intelligent and beautiful. Most of all, the Mac seemed to have people with a consistent and enlightened vision behind it. It was totally graphical so the visual possibilities were much greater. Other computers had more serious reputations but they didn't seem as much fun to program. For its day, it had great graphics and sound, and I knew a lot about programming it. Up to this point I saw no reason to stop using my Atari (except for the fact that hardly anyone else used them and there was practically no audience for the software I was writing). I ended up using a "card" metaphor for this project that was sort of HyperCard-like even though it predated HyperCard by several years. I got one of those "Electronics Made Simple" books, figured out how to use the computer to control the enlarger, and made a rather nice program to control most of my darkroom timing and record-keeping tasks. My interest in photography began to wane at this time. This is when I began my quest for software design beauty. I wanted to discover the simplest and most effective way to perform any task on the computer. Articles that influenced me the most were ones by Chris Crawford in Byte Magazine and by Alan Kay in Scientific American. I began to be very interested in user interface and program design. The next day my wife told me to dismantle it. This also worked fine until one windy night when I was away from home and it set off the alarm every few minutes.
It worked so well I expanded the system to include little tilt switches placed on bushes outside the windows. It displayed a representation of our apartment on the screen and showed when a door or window was open. At one point I designed a home surveillance system for our apartment in Seattle that used little magnetic switches from Radio Shack. I can remember the thrill when I discovered how to input and output signals from the joystick ports. (My wife says that the day it arrived was the happiest she's ever seen me.) Despite its membrane keyboard and TV set monitor, it was loaded with graphics, sound capability, and programming challenges. A couple of months later I was busy programming at home with my own computer, an Atari 400.
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