GOOGLE, 1980: The Game I Wrote Before the Search Engine Existed

Every morning in 7th grade at Tantasqua Regional Junior High, I got off the bus at the corner entrance to the school. The first room we passed was dark through the window. It was my favorite room: the computer lab. It had four video terminals and two printer terminals with no screens at all.

On lab days, I hoped I'd get a video terminal and not the printer. At that point in my life, and in computer history, there were no PCs, laptops or iPads to work on. You were tied to the wall, and you hoped you got the screen. It was all we knew, and it was awesome! There were so many problems to solve and ideas in our heads.

We raced through our homework assignments so there would be time left for our own projects or a team project. Games were hard to come by, but the ones we did get, we could modify and make our own. Everything was text. We used loops to rewrite characters on the screen to make things look animated. Our favorite game to work on as a group was Star Trek. It was multiplayer and complex, and we loved the challenge. It was all text, yet our imaginations filled the screen with fighting starships.

I read endless computing magazines and manuals. We'd hunt for BASIC commands we hadn't used yet and try them out.

That year, I came up with an idea of my own, similar to some of the other text games. The computer created a random grid that was invisible. The player had to navigate up, down, left or right to get from one corner to the other within a time or move limit. Add some fun sayings, a few flashing characters and the computer's beeps, and GOOGLE was born.

The name came from two places. One weekend, my aunt had us make little purple yarn balls, and she put those little eyes on them that we called googly eyes. I also knew the number googol from computer class. (Funny enough, a couple of students named their search engine after that same number about 18 years later.)

I always wanted to turn GOOGLE into a bigger computer game someday, but there were always so many other projects. Recently I found the code in a stack of computer printouts from that time. Lots of memories. With the help of AI, I recreated that nostalgia and ran my game exactly as it was in 1980. Today's technology is incredible. It helped me build an emulator that looks like the computer we used, a Data General Nova, and runs BASIC. I can hit Enter, type my BASIC program, and type RUN, just like the old days.

I hope you'll have fun with it, and use it for your own programs too. Instructions are included for loading BASIC and saving your programs.

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