Programming was a new way of thinking for me, a procedural form of writing that caused things to occur, like a magic incantation. I spent hours writing programs that were like primitive chatbots. I delighted in making the computer print strings with whatever swear words I knew in them. In the back of my Sinclair manual was a folded page containing a BASIC program that, if painstakingly typed in, would create a working text-based game of Monopoly 1. If you managed to write its lines out exactly you could then record it to audio tape to reload it later, something that never worked for me as a child no matter how many times I tried it. If you are old enough to have held a “Speak n’ Spell” toy, you’ll recognize the same flat plastic membrane keyboard that was on the Sinclair 1000. Imagine trying to type a short novella on that ‘keyboard’, at age eight. Imagine that a single typo would render the entire work unreadable. Then imagine that, once successfully com- pleted, you could not save the book, that it dissolved in your hands like a sand mandala. Do this again and again anyway, despite each failure, and despite having little to no interest in the game Monopoly. ¹