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I had my very first computer. Fresh out of the box. It was a Texas Instruments TI99-4a screamin' machine and I had reverse wired an old tape recorder to save programs to and had hooked it up to a screwed up color TV that served as a monitor.
On the night before the 4th of July, my brother came over to visit and to check out my amazing 'system'. We started writing a program in basic that placed the American flag on the TV screen/monitor. Eventually we succeeded, but then decided that we wanted to have it draw the flag instead of just plopping in on the screen. After completing that project, we decided that it would be cool to have it play Yankee Doodle Dandy while drawing the flag. We were able to get the computer to play the song, but getting it to work inside the drawing of the flag was more difficult. After hours went by we were again successful. We then decided that we had to reduce the lines of code to a bare minimum and spent a few more hours completing that project.
Sometime around sunup, Kathy came stumbling down the hall and looked into the room where we sat hunched over my 'system'. She said, "Have you two been up all night working on the computer?"
It was then that we realized we had.
She rolled her eyes and said, "I'm going back to bed, you guys are nuts."
We told her she had to see our beautiful creation and she stood there as we played our program. It was beautiful! Sixteen white stars on a blue background. Red and white bars across the screen. Yankee Doodle playing note by note as the flag appeared. We were amazed at our brilliance.
She said, "That's it? You sat up all night to do that?"
She went to bed. Unimpressed.
We saved it to tape and a few days later I accidently taped music from a record album over it.
:-(
Rod | 
