Tones in the Dark

In the late 1970s my parents had friends we’d visit for dinner now and then. I’ve lost their names and how the families knew each other, all of it, but I remember their house was full of books, and while the adults talked I’d sit and read, as happy as a kid could be. We moved from Indiana to Missouri in 1979 and saw them only once or twice after that. The last time we were ever at their place, the man took us out to his barn to show us a computer he had built. It was enormous, a wall of lights and tape reels and panels that looked like the bridge computer from the original Star Trek. He had one program loaded that he’d been playing with, a maze generator. He’d set some parameters, and I’m fairly sure I remember actual flip switches for it, and the machine would print a maze to a built-in continuous-feed dot matrix printer, running across as many pages as he’d configured. I was fascinated. I went home with a thick stack of generated mazes to solve. That was the first computer I ever…