I stared at the computer screen:

OPEN 1,8,15,”S:RH05″:CLOSE 1|

It was the fall of 1985 and I was sitting in my high school computer lab. There were 20 Commodore PET computers (see featured image) in the lab all sitting on a long table in the middle of the room. 10 of the computers were on one side facing 10 other computers on the other side so that it formed two rows. I was on the right hand side at the farthermost computer so no one could see what I was doing, unless there was someone on the computer to my immediate left, and at the moment there wasn’t. I had just typed this command and had my right index finger poised above the ENTER key, ready to press it and execute the command.

I didn’t want anyone to see what I was doing because I was up to no good. At the time I didn’t feel that way. I thought I was justified in what I was doing. What was I doing? I was getting ready to cause a lot of trouble for a certain individual. See the “S” in that command? It stands for SCRATCH. SCRATCH was the BASIC 2.0 equivalent to DELETE. I was getting ready to delete one of my fellow student’s program that had been submitted for grading.

I heard a shuffle and looked to my left to see Jill Cunningham settle in front of a computer three down from mine. No worries, not close enough to see what I was doing. If I had been thinking more clearly she would have been my target, since her flirtatious temptation had led me to make an error in judgement which ultimately caused me to lose out on the end of year computer award to my best friend Robert. However, that’s another story. I looked in between the space of my computer and the one next to it to see people seated at the computers on the opposite row. There was my target. Her name was Rhonda Hanson and she was my ex-girlfriend. You may have read about her a few times before when I wrote about how we met and about the time I stabbed someone. If you recall, we ended our relationship on good terms. So why was I now ready to destroy her hard work and possibly cause her to fail this class? There was a reason. My finger came down and rested on the surface of the ENTER key.

THREE WEEKS PRIOR

Rhonda and I had ended our relationship on friendly terms. We were still friends, but not the kind of friends that hung out together very much. We were both in the LEO club, which was an organization that did community projects. That is how we initially met. Now that we were broken up we were still friendly with each other when we had meetings or worked on projects, but that’s pretty much the only interaction I had with her anymore.

The LEO club had an annual meeting for all the clubs in Texas. This year it was in Kerrville which is about an eight hour drive from our town. The school gave permission for us to miss school on Friday and our adult sponsors from the parenting LIONS club were driving us all down. We went in two vans and Rhonda and I were not in the same van which really didn’t bother me. I was riding with some of my best friends, Mike, Robert, Steve, and Barbara. We had some good times on just the trip down there alone. When we got to the summer camp in Kerrville where the meeting was going to be held we were the first ones there. In fact we were the only ones there that night since the meeting didn’t kick off until the next day.

So what are a small group of bored teenagers supposed to do at a summer camp all by (mostly) themselves? Get up to no good of course. We actually didn’t really get up to a lot of no good. We played some tennis, explored all the dorms, and played some truth or dare. To make a long story short I suddenly found myself glued to Rhonda’s hip the whole night and things seemed like they might start up again. We didn’t full on make out but there was some physical contact that I did not mind in the least bit. She was putting out all the same signals she had before. I went to bed that night with visions of us starting over again and I couldn’t have been more excited about it. Then He came.

The next morning other LEO clubs started showing up. I was standing there next to Rhonda when we met a group of newcomers. One of them was some dude. I can’t even clearly recall his looks or his name. All I know is that for some reason, Rhonda was instantly all over him and that was it for my plans for a reunification. I tried a few times for the rest of the weekend to make some sort of connection with her but she was all about this new dude and I was kicked to the curb. You can imagine that did not make me feel too good. So to say I bore a bit of resentment after the trip would be accurate.

GUYS WITH SKILLS

Well, I didn’t have any bow hunting skills, no numnunchuck skills (unless you count banging yourself in the balls), but I did have some computer skills. Not sure you could call them hacking skills but in 1985 I had more computer skills than a lot of people. You weren’t allowed to take a computer course until you were a Junior (Grade 11 for my Canuck readers), however in my Sophomore year (Grade 10) my friend Robert and I became friends with our biology teacher, Mr. Dempsey, who also happened to be the computer teacher. We all had Commodore 64 computers at home so a lot of times after school he would let us into the computer lab to run and trade programs. While I was in there I learned how to program the PET computers that weren’t much different than the Commodore 64 as far as basic commands went.

So when it came down to it I knew how to do a lot of things that the average Joe who was taking a computer class for the first time did not know how to do. Even the other teachers that used those computers had no clue how to really work them. For example, our Spanish class would sometimes go into the computer lab to run a program that would grade us on translating English sentences to Spanish and back. The Spanish teacher had this program on the same disk that she kept her grade book program on. They didn’t even think to use passwords back then so when I was done doing the translate program, I could pull up her grade book and do whatever I wanted with it. I could have changed my grade just like in War Games but I didn’t need to. I was already getting an A. My Spanish was muy bien. But I did get to see all the other students grades and could have changed those if I had wanted, but Rhonda didn’t take Spanish and Mr. Dempsey wasn’t dumb enough to keep his grade book program on a disk I could get to, so I would have to do something different.

The way the computer class worked was that you were assigned a program to write each week. While you were working on it you saved your progress to a tape drive next to the computer. At the end of the table with all the computers on it was a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive that every PET computer was hooked up to through a multiplex switch. When you were done with your program and ready to submit it for grading, you saved it on a disk in the drive that Mr. Dempsey put in at the beginning of each week. If your program was not on that disk at the end of class on Friday then you got a zero for the assignment.

You were encouraged to keep all your programs on your cassette tape as a backup but most people didn’t do this because it was a pain in the ass to keep multiple programs on a cassette tape when you had to continually fast forward the tape to get to subsequent programs. The more programs on it the longer it took to get it loaded and even though the tape drives had number counters on them, they were not that accurate and you often had errors trying to load the programs from tape because you weren’t at the right spot. For this reason almost everyone just rewound their tape all the way to the beginning and overwrote their last program with work on the next one.

BACK IN THE LAB

That Friday in 1985 when I was up to no good, I had been clandestinely keeping an eye on Rhonda. It looked like to me that she had just saved her program for the week to the disk. I entered a command on my own computer to verify this:

VOLUME IN DRIVE 8 = WEEK 5

AA05
CF05
JC05
LL05
MP05
RH05
RP05

Yup, there was her program, RH05 (Rhonda Hanson Program Week 5), submitted and ready for grading. Mr. Dempsey also gave out the next week’s program assignment on Friday so we could work on it over the weekend if we wanted to. I could see that Rhonda was looking at the assignment and sure enough she started to do a bit of preliminary programming for it. After a few minutes I watched her rewind her cassette tape all the way to the beginning and save what she had just been working on over the last program she had just submitted for grading. Now there was only one copy and it was on that disk. If it were to get deleted it would be like it never existed. It would be like she never did the work. She would get a zero for the assignment and she’d be fucked. Sounded like a perfect act of revenge for leading me on and then blowing me off.

I slowly pressed my finger on the ENTER key. The button depressed maybe a sixteenth of an inch. All I had to do was apply a bit more pressure and the contact in the key would touch the contact in the board sending a signal to enter the command on the screen to send the electrons running from the computer through the switch to the disk drive where they would be transformed into magnetic pulses in the drive heads to scramble program RH05 as the disk whirred under them. Just a little more pressure. Just a little more. I couldn’t do it. I had the motive. I had the means. I just didn’t have the conscience to do it. I took my finger off the key and erased the command off the screen. In the end I just couldn’t be THAT guy. I wasn’t that mean. I wanted to be that mean but I wasn’t.

I never did tell her how close she came to my revenge that day. Good thing I didn’t, since she probably wouldn’t have gone with me to my Senior prom the next year. But that is also another story.

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