EGGOG

Remember your first program?

I wrote mine at about eight: computing the area of a circle. My mom worked as a design engineer and often took me along to her office - there was nobody to leave me with. It was a great place: a drafting table, a case of drawing instruments (I doubt anyone under forty even knows what those are).

To keep me out of the way, she would hand me a Soviet programmable calculator, the Elektronika MK-56, which answered every mistake with "ЕГГОГ" - the display's best Cyrillic approximation of the word "error" (it took me many years to figure that out).

I remember how thrilled I was when I got the calculator to show not just digits but weird squiggles - that was how it represented hexadecimal digits (an undocumented feature).

Later I even wrote "graphical" games on those calculators, where every move took a couple of minutes to compute.