How It All Began
It all really started sometime in the early ’80s, back when I was still running around as a curious kid with more imagination than patience. One day, my dad came home from work carrying a computer — a big, orange-gray, mysterious machine that felt just as magical as the space missions we watched on TV.
Around the same time, the legendary TV show Knight Rider was airing — you know, the one where the hero talks to his super-intelligent car, KITT, and the car actually talks back with absolute confidence. What we’d now call artificial intelligence was, back then, pure — and very unreachable — science fiction.
Naturally, we kids were over the moon. Could Dad’s computer be a little like KITT? Could it think, understand us… maybe even talk to us? Of course, we started experimenting right away. We typed in words, sentences, secret questions — and got the same cold, brutal reply every single time: “Syntax Error.” No matter what we tried, the computer stayed as silent as a stone statue.
Seeing our long faces, Dad patiently explained that the computer couldn’t talk like we did — it only understood a very limited language. And right there, in the middle of our failed experiments, we got our very first lessons in the programming language Basic.
The more I learned, the more I realized just how far reality was from KITT, the talking supercar.
But then something amazing happened: we discovered the magical world of computer games!
After a lot of convincing (and probably more than a little begging), we finally managed to bring home a Commodore 64 — an absolute treasure chest back then. Suddenly, computers could actually do something fun!
But happiness, at least at first, was short-lived. Trying to create our own games in Basic turned out to be… well, let’s just call it an exercise in patience. Even drawing the simplest graphics made the poor computer sound like it was gasping for air. It was like asking a turtle to run a marathon.
And yet, the dream never died.
Now, as an adult, living in a time where today’s computers are more powerful than we ever dared imagine back then, I feel the moment has finally come. The idea is still alive: to bring Basic back — but this time, turn it into the language it always should have been. A language for creativity, play, and expression. A language for everyone.