Letters from Computer Camp

Hello, Muddah, Hello, Fadduh, here I am at computer camp in Mooclus, Connecticut. Soon there'll be 100 children here to devote some of their summer to staring at the pallid blip, blip, blip of a computer's cursor rather than at a council fire's light. As many as 5000 little kids will be doing their daily Qwertys at computer camps from here to California, and I'll be at one of the nicest ones, on these 300 acres of clover leaves. For one half month, I'll live in a pine-wood cabin with an assortment of eight-, nine- and ten-year-olds, and I'll sleep, wake up and press on the enter key with them. I'm overage, but I'm supposed to investigate this for Playboy.

•

In our cabin are six little kids, and the first to arrive today was David. "Oh, there's a toad there," he shouted outside our wooden door, and he scooped up the wart-erupting thing.

"The frog will have to stay outside," our counselor told us.

"The toad," David corrected him. He dropped it, it hopped in willy-nilly, and the second arrival was Jude.

"I've got a better watch than you. It's $400," he said to our toad-hunting counselor, and the third arrival was Christian. He was blowing bubbles with his gum, and Jude shouted, "Pop!" as he lunged with his index finger, popping one. It splatted, and our counselor couldn't peel it off Christian's face. It looked like a German dueling scar.

The other arrivals were Ethan, Kevin and Raun. After dinner, our counselor said, "It's free time," and the six children and the 94 others ran to our rec room, where, in the scent of the woodsy knotty pine, are 100 computers, as at NASA mission control. And beep, beep, boom, it sounded like a penny arcade as the children slid in such (continued an page 128)Computer Camp(continued from page 123) cartridges as Hunt the Wutnpus and Munch Man.

"All right, wumpus, here I come," said David, a Korean-American and the capturer of our mascot toad. His slitted eyes on the monitor, he didn't fall into its seaweed-colored slime pits but followed the wumpus' red-colored spoor until the whole monitor went red, a set of fat white teeth appeared and—chomp—the computer's calliope tune was Chopin's Funeral March. "Oh, the wumpus got me!" David cried. "I died! I died!"

And beep! In the clamorous room, no one was using the abc, etc., keys, except for a boy who two-finger typed on a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A,

10 Print "Hello, Scuzzbomb"

20 Print "Hello, Bombscuzz"

after which he typed RUN, and the computer printed it. Two hours later, we ran back to our cabin and we had lights out at 9:45 on our first day at computer camp.

•

I am not homesick, but Ethan is. He looks like a boy behind the barbed wire of a concentration camp. He didn't hunt the wumpus yesterday, but he stood underneath a poster of pi (computed to 8000 places) crying, wiping his circular eyes on his T-shirt's picture of Mr. Peanut. The nurse at our kindly computer camp said, "'Do you have an owwie?"

"I don't know," Ethan sniffled. "What is it?"

"A cut. A scrape. A scratch."

"I feel bad on the inside, not the out," Ethan sniffled.

"Do you want to play a game with me? Like Munch Man?"

"No, I'd just short the computer out," Ethan sniffled. "With tears."

We tried to cheer up Ethan today. Raun told him the joke about the lettuce-and-tomato race. "Who won?" Raun asked, and Ethan didn't know. "Well, the lettuce was ahead and the tomato couldn't catch up. Hee, hee," Raun said, but Ethan didn't smile.

Christian gave him the wrapper from his Bazooka bubble gum. "You will soon meet a tall, dark stranger," the wrapper told him. "Frankenstein." But Ethan already had that in his gum-wrapper collection.

Kevin invited him to a bed-blanket game of Dungeons and Dragons. "Do you know the four basic undead monsters?" Kevin asked.

"No," Ethan sniffled.

"Skeletons, zombies, ghouls, wights. Do you know the expert monsters?"

"No," Ethan sniffled.

"Mummies, specters, vampires, wraiths. What do you want to be?"

"An elf," Ethan sniffled. "Oh, I don't care!"

He sat on the bunk hugging himself. A woman counselor sang for him, "Well ye gang tae the Hielands, Leezie Lindsay? Well ye gang tae the Hielands wi' me?" but Ethan wanted Home on the Range. The counselor didn't know it, so she programmed it on an Apple II—

100 for I = 768 to 795:

Read J: Poke I, J: Next

110 Poke 1013,76

etc.—and the Apple whistled beep, beep on the beep for Ethan. He feels better now.

•

We had a class today in Basic. A counselor with a T-shirt displaying the Maxwell equations said to Jude, "What's your name?" Jude told him, and the counselor wrote

10 Print "Hello Jode"; 20 Goto 10

on a T.I. computer. He then wrote RUN, and the monitor made a big brick wall of 100 Hello Judes. At once, Christian said, "Hello, Jude," David said, "It should be Hey, Jude," Raun started singing,

"Hey, Jude,I saw you nude.Don't try to fake it,J saw you naked,"

and Jude just waved at the garrulous monitor, saying, "Hi." At eight years old, Jude is the youngest person at our computer camp. He wears jeans and he clomps around as though he has wrestled bulls at wild-West rodeos. Very little bulls.

"Jude, " the counselor said. "How many times did the monitor print your name?"

"Five hundred sixty-two thousand four hundred and sixty-eight times," Jude said unequivocally.

"Why did it do it?"

"Um, because.... Urn---"

"Because I'd written in the instruction GOTO 10."

"No, that isn't right," said Jude in his calling-the-hogs-home manner. "It should be GO and space and TO."

"Not necessarily. In Basic---"

"It's two words," said Jude.

"Not necessarily---"

"One word GO. Another TO."

"I'm lazy," the counselor sighed. "I didn't want to hit the space bar."

"Why is the monitor green?"

"Because---"

"The other monitors aren't green. They're blue."

"Jude," the counselor pleaded. "Do you want me to tear my hair out?"

"I want to wrile HELLO RAUN," said Raun.

"I want to go to the bathroom," said Christian.

"I don't understand," said David. "Can you say everything again?"

"Of course I can," the counselor moaned. "I woke up, I said, 'Good morning,' I said, 'I'll have some oatmeal,' I

said, 'What's your name, Jude---' All

right," the counselor told us a half hour later. "Gun up your engines, gentlemen."

We turned the computers on. The children sat on their ankles, raising their arms to their keyboards, like men repairing automobiles on hydraulic jacks. A finger here, a finger there and the monitors burst out with Jude Jude Judes and Raun Raun Rauns and BARF BARF BARFs in David's case. The programs done, the children left for the tennis courts, and Jude hit the ball clear over the fence, shouting, "A homer!" We have tennis at our computer camp, too.

•

Muddah! Fadduh! I was robbed! It happened today in the beep-beep-boom computer room. The little children were at the Hunt the Wumpuses, but the bigger children were at their engines inventing games. A boy had programmed a lunar-lander game in Basic. Another boy had programmed a Dungeons and Dragons game that said, A Vampire Starts To Eat Your Guts, another had programmed a bowling game and another had programmed a slot machine. A 13-year-old, he pulled the little black joy stick and the monitor told him,

Cherry Cherry Cherry

Hot Dog! You Win $2.00!

"Do you want to play it? It's 25 cents," the boy, whose name was Billy, said.

He had a twisted smile as I gave him his quarter. I pulled the little stick and the monitor reported, Cherry Cherry Lemon. I gave him another quarter and the monitor snorted, Orange Orange Cherry. I gave him a total of six shiny quarters and admitted, "I lost."

"It's crooked," Billy confessed.

"No!"

"I had my little finger on the keyboard, see," Billy continued, "and I just tapped the number-three key"

"No! What happened then?"

"The program gosubbed to 230," he continued and had his monitor print it:

230 for I = 1 to 3: A(I) = 0: Next

235 X = 0: X = PDL(1): IF X 255

Then goto 235

240 for I=1 to 3

etc. "So you lost automatically. I invented (continued on page 220)Computer Camp(continued from page 128) this when I was 12 and I've made $200 already."

"No!" I gasped again. "From whom?" "My friends. My father. My little sister."

"No! And they still don't know?"

"No. The trick is I'm never greedy. I let them walk away with something and I keep them coming back." At that, Billy refunded my quarters and I promised I wouldn't finger him in playboy. His name really isn't Billy.

•

The moon just had an eclipse. It turned a red-cabbage color and Ethan photographed it. He used his Polaroid flashbulb, but he wasn't close enough and the picture didn't come out. He said, "Aw."

This morning, Ethan played catch, and he discovered a gxps this afternoon. He told me, "It's secret," so I've written gxps in the secret code that he and everyone else learned in Basic class. Ethan would tap out:

10 Input A$

20 for I= 1 to LEN(A$)

30 B$ = MID$(A$, I, 1)

40 N=ASC(B$)

50 N = N + 3

etc., so that ABC became DEF on his computer. Any letter moved three letters up.

The gxps, anyway, was in a forest where Ethan had gone exploring with Kevin. First, Ethan discovered a waterfall whose water he caught in a snail shell while he lay alongside, like the White Rock boy. He sailed an old log right over the precipice, and he discovered a road among the iron-woods that he started walking along with Kevin. "But maybe we'll fall off a cliff," said Kevin, to whom the whole world was Dungeons and Dragons and who cautiously laid down an arrow of ironwood twigs to show their route to the rescue party. "Or we'll encounter a ghoul there---"

"Oh, you're really nailed to Dungeons and Dragons," Ethan sighed.

At the road's end was the secret gxps, and Kevin said, "God," and Ethan said, "Holy cow." It was full of old, empty, rusted cans of Bud and old, empty, broken bottles of Michelob in old, sodden mattresses of The Hartford Couranl.

"Look here," said Kevin, "a real glass glass," meaning it wasn't plastic.

"And here," said Ethan, "a genie bottle," meaning an empty quart of Mateus.

"It will be soil pretty soon," said Kevin. "But what about now?"

He hit his walking stick on a bottle of Bowl Quick. It shattered, and Ethan hit his own walking stick on a can of Sprite. For 30 minutes, the two aided biodegradation by slogging onto the papier-mâché and by whack, whack, whacking away at the hideous gxps as adventurously as Huckleberry and Tom. Then they ran to the hot computer room and to Ethan's classified code.

Pxggdk! Idggxk! Kdylqj zrqghuixo wlph!

•

I didn't say. We have little girls at our computer camp like Amie. It's her birthday—she's 12—and she was sitting today at an Apple, making herself a chocolate birthday cake. Her glasses, with a gold heart on the lens, reflected a little green firefly—the blink, blink, blink of the cursor as she intently wrote:

600 HLIN 26,28 AT 36: PLOT 27,35

610 HLIN 30,32 AT 36: PLOT 31,35

620 HLIN 34,36 AT 36: PLOT 35,35

etc., to depict the white icing, the blue trimming, the one red candle and its orange-and-yellow right-angled flame. But after many hours, a chip in the Apple malfunctioned and Amie had nothing but a row of inedible hexadecimals. "Oh," she sighed to Robin, her closest friend. "My birthday cake! It fell!"

She wasn't happy. But then, as the two girls strolled to lunch, there came to Amie a heaven-sent sign. A bluebird—well, a sick little kingbird—dropped from the sycamores onto Robin's head. It, too, seemed sad, and Amie said, "Robin, there's a bird in your hair. Oh, dear."

"What color?" Robin asked eagerly.

"It must be awfully diseased. Gray," Amie answered, "and white underneath. Oh, dear."

"It sounds pretty," Robin said.

"It must be dying, and it will infect you, Robin. Oh---"

"It's going cootchie, cootchie," Robin giggled.

"Dear. Oh, dear," Amie said. But that bird unruffled itself to return to its wild blue yonder, and Amie, inspired, returned after lunch to a new computer and a new happy-birthday cake. She started again—100 HLIN 1Ø,12 AT 35—but she secretly outlined the one red candle to the screen routine. And before dinner, the cake appeared, the candle arose and Amie exclaimed, "My pride and joy! And," she continued, "wacko," for her candle, see, was a Roman candle, and she had programmed it to explode into 1000 shooting stars. Her birthday today was the Fourth of July.

P.S. So was Christian's. He was given a three-dimensional cake by David, Ethan, Jude, Kevin and Raun. We used its ten red candles, then, to pop the party balloons for a grand and glorious Fourth.

•

Help! There's a pirate in our cabin, and it's Kevin! He doesn't look it: He wears glasses and a peculiar brace, like a horse's bit. But sitting today at an Apple, playing at Star Trek, he announced, "You know where I got this game?" And leaning back like an entrepreneur in a swivel chair, he reported to us, "I pirated it."

We were aghast. We knew, of course, of a couple of older pirates, for we had seen on their monitors

Fastass Copies!

40-Second Copies!

No Shit!

or other illegal programs, such as the Pi

rate's Friend or Locksmith or Clone. With those, the children could put a high-priced disk of Swashbuckler, say, in Disk Drive I and copy it onto their personal disk in Disk Drive II. "Go," they would whisper to the two whirring disks as our counselors prowled about to try to obstruct them in their criminal acts by reciting the riot act: "No piracies on our facilities!" The children would say, "Oh, we didn't know," but, in fact, they were selling the pirate treasures, using the one-dollar profits to buy Coca-Cola.

But they were 12 years old, and Kevin, ten, had us speechless when he told us while playing his Star Trek, "I pirated it."

"But Kevin! But Kevin!" Ethan stammered. "That's illegal, isn't it?"

"It's legally against the law," said Kevin, the Dungeons and Dragons boy.

"But what if they catch you, Kevin?"

"I'll go to Juvenile, I guess."

"But what if your father finds out?"

"I guess he'll--- Oh, God!" Kevin cried as a wing of Klingon ships surrounded him on his hijacked copy of Star Trek. "They're going to fire their photon torps!" In despair, he ran outside to the baseball diamond, to throw up his hands erratically and to catch a fly ball with both eyes closed. We have baseball at our computer camp, too.

•

No one has poison ivy yet, but Kevin has his allergy and Christian, remember, had his dueling scar and Ethan had a tooth come out. One got antihistamine and one got oleomargarine from the camp's considerate nurse, and one got one fat dollar from the tooth fairy. "Last time, I got 25 cents. Inflation," Raun observed.

Raun had strep himself, and the camp banished him to a one-man cabin, quarantined. We went there, anyhow, as Kevin whispered, "We are now entering a contaminated area. Proceed with care. Proceed with care."

In his bed, Raun was wrapped in a sheet, like an Egyptian mummy. "Don't come close," he told us. "I'm 103."

"How are you?" Christian asked him.

"Bad. In fact, miserable. My head feels like a bowling ball."

"I understand. It feels round," Jude told him.

"No, not round like a bowling ball. Not spherical."

"It feels like a ball rolling down the alley, doesn't it?" David contributed.

"No. It just feels heavy like a bowling ball," Raun answered. "Ooh! "

We had taken him a T.I. computer. He plugged it in and two-finger typed, 10 Print Raun Raun Raun, but he had forgotten quotation marks, and the computer reported, Incorrect Statement. He then typed, 10 Print You'Re A Stupid Computer, but the computer repeated, Incorrect Statement.

Raun stopped typing. "I got this constipation, too," he told us. "And when I get constipation, I get diarrhea, too."

"Yeah, that's gross," we agreed. We left, and he got better playing a game of Tombstone City.

•

I just met the Pirate King. He's known throughout the computer world as Zap. He's 16 and his hair is a bramblebush, and he was sitting at an Apple, playing Apple Panic. He was hitting the keyboard keys as, on his monitor, a gardener in a greenhouse ran to the left, to the right and up and down ladders to escape from a crop of man-eating mutant apples. "I started when I was 14," said Zap, his fingers dripping sweat. "I pirated Puck Man, a version of Pac-Man. It took me two weeks, because it wasn't in Basic. See," he said, still playing, "it was in language like,

373A- A0 0D LDY #$0D

3745- 90 F0 BCC $3737

3747- A9 10

shmoo," he interrupted himself as one apple on his monitor almost ate him, but Zap returned immediately to Puck Man. "The cocksuckers coded it," he said. "On track zero, the 11th sector was in reverse sync, so I had to rewrite it before beginning to crack it."

"Mm," I said.

"Since then, I've cracked the code on Roach Motel and Peeping Tom and Crush, Crumble and Chomp and---"

"What do you do once you've cracked it?" I asked.

"The disk, I give it to someone in New Rochelle. Grrr," said Zap as he buried a ravenous apple in the greenhouse's floor. "At first, I just mailed it to the guy's post-office box. But now he's like really weird and he telephones me, 'Stick it in the glove compartment of the big green car on Penfield Place,' or 'Stick it to page 13 of The New York Times and leave the Times on the ninth stool at the Doughnut Master,' or 'Go to the lion's cage at the Bronx Zoo. A man in a long brown coat will ask if you have some peanuts. Then---' "

"How much does the man pay you?" I asked.

"You ever see Mission: Impossible? I feel like the chief of the Impossible Missions Force. No," Zap answered as he wiped his perspiring fingers on his T-shirt front. "I'm not paid, I do this for fun."

"But Zap!" I said. "The disk can be copied, right? The man can be selling a couple of hundred thousand for a couple of million dollars!"

"It's not my problem," said Zap, interring the last of the runaway apples. "For me, it's fun. I need a towel. Whew!"

•

Last night, muddah, fadduh, was our last night at computer camp. In one cabin, the boys short-sheeted the counselor, and in another, the boys dropped the counselor's mattress into the swimming pool. In one nice cabin, the girls pulled the side springs out of the counselor's bed—it turned into a hammock, instead—and in another, the boys started singing,

"If we weren't computer campers,This is what we'd be, If we weren't computer campers, Gigolos we'd be!Ten, 20, 30!Give it to us dirty!"

In our more innocent cabin, we told ghost stories and no one slept especially well. In the night, Jude started sleepwalking and Ethan started scratching himself and Kevin started shouting, "X = INT (100* RND(1)) + 1," and Ethan heard it, apparently, because he said to Kevin today, "You were wrong. You just needed two parentheses."

"I needed four," Kevin insisted.

We're going home today. Our parents, our grandparents and even our great-grandparents have come to claim us. David's mother looked on as he scrambled the y-wing fighters on a T.I. computer, telling him, "Oh, you're wonderful!"

Ethan's grandmother told him to write on an Apple computer, "I love you," and it turned into L ORYH BRX in his secret code. "Oh, my! Will it work on your home computer?" his grandmother asked.

"No," Ethan answered her. "I've initialized this, and I'd wipe it out if I reinitialized it."

"I'm wiped out now," his grandmother said, and Jude's great-grandmother asked him, "Are you eating well?"

"Yeah. Now listen," Jude answered her. He punched up

10 FOR S = 1 TO 10

20 CALL SOUND (100,S*200,1)

30 Next S

on a T.I. computer, and it played do, re, mi, etc.

"Oh," his great-grandmother gasped. "But, Jude. What happened to your nose?"

"The bottom of the swimming pool. Now listen again," Jude answered, and he played do, re, mi, etc., until it soared out of human hearing range.

"Oh," his great-grandmother gasped again.

Christian's family hadn't come yet, and he sat playing a game of Blasto. His tank strayed into a minefield, though, a boom interrupted the music of Yankee Doodle Dandy and Christian laughed, "I got blown to bits," hitting the redo button until his father reclaimed him. So did computer camp end.

•

We are living in changing times. Come, muddahs, come, fadduhs, throughout the land, listen now and you may understand. Must children know how to operate computers to survive in the Nineties? Yes, and they must know how to operate telephones, too. Must children know how to program computers in the Nineties? No, nor must they know how to serve as telephone operators. Is there a practical reason, then, to send children to a computer camp? No, there isn't. Is there a reason at all to send children there? Yes, there is. It's fun. And isn't that what being a kid is about?

Or being a human being? Me, I loved my happy computer camp, for I recollected what I had known as a child: that a computer or anything else is to be enjoyed or dispensed with. Is the thing efficient? I don't care. Is the thing, though, fun? It was, and I wish you were there, muddah, fadduh, to see how our world ought to be. My love and a thousand kisses, here they come:

10FOR K = 1 TO 1000

20 PRINT "X";

30 NEXT K

40 END