Nebraska State Fair and Programming

This past weekend I ran across an article on Buzz (a site that deserves a separate post all to itself) talking about how the Nebraska state fair faces extinction . Well, it really took me back.

I was born in Nebraska, and lived there until half way through the 6th grade. And since my parents were good Nebraskans, we always spent a day during the summer running all over the fair grounds - watching cattle competitions, buying and eating really good taffy, looking at big vegetables, buying dinosaur-shaped erasers, etc. As I got older I started entering in various 4H competitions: art, photography, baking (which my mom reminded me about... it seemed I had blocked it from my memory), and probably the most important - programming.

My dad and I were members of the "Bits and Bytes Computer Club", which was a monthly meeting to learn about programming and computers in general. Apple II's were all the rage back then, and we had an Apple IIe that I could try things out on. One of the projects for the club was a conversion program - going from metric to english and back. I wrote the program for both the club and the fair, and I spent quite a bit of time on it. It was quite a task for a 4th grader - since I was writing code to do equations without knowing algebra. Of course it helped that my dad is an engineer, but true to his nature he wouldn't _tell_ me anything, he had to teach me how it all worked :)

So after a lot of hard work I ended up with a program in BASIC that was about 43K in size - which seemed like a lot at the time. We hauled our IIe to the fair so I could present the program, and I won a purple ribbon (1st prize) which also got me a $50 gift certificate to a local computer store. My dad suggested that we spend the money on a modem, so we could connect to BBSes and other computers, but I said something like "why would anyone want to do that?", and bought a couple of games. Heh, quite the visionary :)

I don't know if they still have programming competitions at the fair, but it would be a shame for kids to not have the opportunity to experience all of the things that the fair provides. Plus, Husker fans really need to do _something_ with their free time other than watch football :p (go blackshirts!)