Lode Runner, Ultima, and a Samsung Tape Drive

A look back — long before any of the tools we argue about now.

These episodes come from studying computer science in Korea in the 1990s. But the memory starts a few years earlier, with a handful of words from the 1980s.

A personal-computer contest

In 1985, my elementary school in Busan ran an after-school class to pick kids for a math competition. That year the regional district math contest happened to be discontinued, so the class was quietly converted into a computer class instead — and that’s how I first met a personal computer, and the idea of a contest built around one. It was probably an early ancestor of today’s programming olympiads. I got lucky: in 1986 I went up to Seoul for the first time, to a place called Jamsil, as one of Busan’s representatives. Picture a large hall where each kid hauls in their own computer and sits an exam for four hours, a little like candidates at an old civil-service examination. To get there you had to win your way through the district round, then the Busan city round.

Get Chaesang Jung’s stories in your inbox

My first time out, a bug knocked me out — a real heartbreak. Trying to get past it, I took several more runs at the regional contests through the eighth grade, and along the way I picked up some real skill — and got a lot friendlier with computer games. I never made it back to the national round, but I climbed to first in the district at my last contest. A reasonably happy ending.

The Samsung SPC-1000

The first Samsung product in our house was this computer. I’d run into one at school, and after I earned the ticket to the national round in Seoul, I begged my parents until it followed me home. The strange mechanical whir of loading from a cassette tape; the games that started once the whirring stopped; the small charms of dots arranged across a black-and-white screen. It saw me through elementary school, came with me to every contest, and gave me my first taste of disappointment and failure.

Computer Study

This was the first reason I had to get — or earn — an allowance every month. There was a sister magazine too, Students and Computers, and some months I’d agonize over which of the two to buy; there were fancier books around, I remember. The content was a fair mix of fun pieces, new technology, and games. But what really mattered about this magazine was the source code. Typing those listings in, line by line, built a patience I didn’t notice I was building — and it paid off later.

The Apple II+

I begged for a new one in middle school, ostensibly for the contests. I don’t remember exactly which model it was — maybe a IIe. I loved the clack of that keyboard, and it’s where I first stepped into the new world of the floppy disk. The contests were the pretext; honestly, I was one step from full game addiction.

Lode Runner, Ultima 4, Ultima 5, Ogre

The companions of my middle-school years. Lord British, thou art, and an endless vocabulary of game spells, ingredients, weapons, dragons…

After that I shifted into exam-prep mode, head down for college entrance, and that’s how I walked into the 1990s.

Part of 90s Computer Science Stories — first-person notes on growing up with computers and studying CS in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/30