Pointers

The first pointer in my life appeared at age five—in the form of a magic string I typed into a television.

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When I was five, my parents bought me a Soviet clone of the ZX Spectrum. Don’t remember whose exactly—but definitely not the Stavropol-made “Vesta.” Something else, nameless, cobbled together on someone’s knee at some research institute that collapsed along with the Soviet Union.

This—if you missed the era—was a computer that plugged into a TV and loaded programs from an audio cassette. The loading sound—a piercing modem screech, only worse. I even had a five-inch floppy drive—luxury by those standards. And—a magic string: RANDOMIZE USR 15616. I was five, and I didn’t know that 15616 was the loader address for the floppy drive. A pointer. The first pointer in my life. I pressed Enter—and something happened. What exactly—depended on what was stored at that address. The number—pointed to a location. The location—contained code. The code—ran. Chain: address $\to$ content $\to$ action.

A pointer at age five, on a Soviet clone of the ZX Spectrum, — it was with that line, not with my mother’s fairy tales and not with school algebra, that real logic actually began in me.