Most origin stories start with a famous machine. A C64. A ZX Spectrum. Something with cultural weight.
Mine started with a SpectraVideo MSX.
If that name means nothing to you, that’s fine. It was a keyboard computer with a cassette drive, hooked up to a small black and white television. Before the Spectrum was everywhere. Before the C64 owned the playground. MSX was Microsoft’s attempt to standardise the home computer market — one architecture, multiple manufacturers. The idea was sound. The market didn’t agree.
You turned it on and got a BASIC prompt. No apps. No launcher. No abstraction between you and the machine. Just:
Ok
That was the entire greeting. The machine was ready. The question was whether you were.
I wrote programs in MSX-BASIC. Small things — a guessing game, a loop that printed my name until I interrupted it, a calculator that handled three operations. None of it was useful. All of it was mine.
Loading a program meant four minutes of high-pitched noise from the cassette drive, followed by either success or a read error that wiped the last twenty minutes of your afternoon. You learned to save often. You learned to label your tapes. You learned that computers don’t care about effort — only about correctness.
MSX-DOS came later. CP/M-compatible. A command line with no safety nets. You typed what you meant and the machine executed it. If you deleted something, it was gone. No undo. No confirmation dialog. It assumed you were sure.
I don’t think I’d have become a software architect without that machine. Not because it was powerful — it wasn’t — but because it was naked. No abstraction thick enough to hide what the computer was actually doing. The hardware was simple enough to hold in your head.
Modern development environments are extraordinary. They are also, frequently, a way to be productive without understanding anything.
The SpectraVideo lost. MSX lost to the C64, to the Spectrum, eventually to DOS. The machine I learned on became a collector’s item and a footnote.
But when I’m debugging something at 2am and I strip back all the tooling and start thinking about what the machine is actually doing — that’s the SpectraVideo talking.