The 1981 Computer Camp Origin Story

Ron Frazier’s University of Miami baseball camp was the plan.

My world made sense because it was physical and predictable. Then a nail through my foot punctured that certainty. One sharp accident and the summer I was supposed to have vanished.

So I was sent to computer camp. This was 1981. Way before devises and video games more complex than “Pong”. This is just before personal computers were a thing.

I walked into that room and the Apple II Plus sat there like an altar. Black screen. Green cursor. A blinking invitation. The kind that doesn’t demand you answer—just waits until you do. And when I typed those first lines of BASIC, the machine spoke back in a language that felt native to my nervous system.

“HELLO” repeated forever.

Not just a loop—a signal.

Like the world was saying: This is your doorway.

I didn’t refuse with words. I refused with the old identity—regular kid.

Because if you accept a call like that, you have to admit something terrifying:

You’re not like everyone else.

And once you know that, you can’t unknow it.

So I told myself it was just camp. Just a weird hobby. Just a detour.

But the detour followed me home.

For most people, their mentor is often a person.

For me, it was a system.

The Apple didn’t judge me. It didn’t misunderstand my intent. It didn’t care if I was ten, or limping. It rewarded curiosity with power. Cause → effect. Question → answer.

Back at school, I found the edge of the adult world: their files, their records, their hidden architecture. And I crossed into it, quietly, because I could.

Seeing my sister’s grade wasn’t just a temptation; it was the first test of what this new power meant. I didn’t do it to steal. I didn’t do it to harm. I did it the way kids do things when love and justice get tangled together: I tried to fix something the only way I knew how.

That’s the moment I stepped out of childhood innocence and into consequence.

And then the “authority” arrived: meetings, whispers, labels, adults trying to make the story tidy.

They didn’t see “ability.”

They saw “threat.”

So they did what institutions do when they can’t understand a kid who moved faster than their rules:

They tried to contain me.

The special school. The remedial classes.

The message underneath it all:

Your mind is a problem we need to manage.

But the real transformation wasn’t the punishment.

It was what woke up in me afterward:

An early, permanent awareness that systems don’t automatically equal justice.

That intent can be misread.

That power without wisdom causes damage.

That was the “Call to Adventure” for me.

Not a sword in a stone.

A cursor in the dark.