In his book, Extra Life: Coming of Age in Cyberspace, David S. Bennahum recalled the thrill of his first night with the Atari 800, a very old computer. He unearthed it in 1996. The components had been long obsolete. The floppy disks were labeled "Starcross" and "Astrochase." He remembered that first night with the Atari 800 when he wrote a few rudimentary lines of code and got the computer to greet his father with the words "Nice to meet you, Michael."

For Bennahum and his friends, computing was first an antidote to loneliness. The early games required a cluster of eager minds to help each other pirate software, tinker with code, figure our bugs and compare triumphs. Together, 10-year-old boys (sometimes with a girl) with thick glasses and geeky outfits were creating their own community, a world apart from their teachers, parents and older siblings.

"Ours was the first generation to have toys that bore little relation to the world of adults, or reality on this planet," Bennahum writes. It was an example of how a subculture built by kids would work its way upward into the cultural mainstream.

Computing, Bennahum notes, taught him about collaboration, loyalty, ethics (to steal or not to steal passwords), logic, persistence, ambition, and experimentation. At a critical turning point, when he was twelve and dabbling precociously in drugs and sex, he chose computing over a more self destructive path. He asked his father for the Atari 800.

In his high school computer room, Bennahum found a world where he could excel, escape, and find community. "The intense programming, the collaboration, the room itself, had become refuge for many of us," he writes. "Divorced parents, divided homes, siblings, battling drug addiction, all the strains of home disappeared when we were in front of the terminal."

But computers changed. The communal culture, the giddy sense of co-creation, began to give way to slick, ready made software and computer buyers who were uninterested in what was happening beneath the beige shell. For Bennahum, the change carried with it a sense of profound loss-- partly the inevitable passing of adolescence and partly the shift in a technology that has become more private, more packaged, more simplistically presented and centrally designed.

Will the Internet, with its promises of decentralized ownership and global connection, become a home for today's inquisitive, lonely ten-year-olds? Bennahum makes no prediction, but in telling his story, he preserves an era of 20^th century technology, heady days that are as vividly remembered, and as thoroughly vanished, as his own computer-age adolescence.

Excerpted from "Come home, little Atari, we'll never forget you" by Anndee Hochman,

The Sunday Oregonian, March 7, 1999