The book was designed for smart 12-year-olds, so I could just about understand what was going on. Gradually, it dawned on me that even a dumb political science major could program one of these things. All it took was a perverse willingness to make mistakes.
OK, I was no Bill Gates. But I learned how to do some useful things with the machine besides play Donkey Kong.
I used it to track congressional voting records, analyze racial voting patterns in city elections, and figure out where candidates were getting their money - and spending it.
There wasn't much commercial software in those days - or not that I could afford - so I rolled my own. When somebody actually wrote a spreadsheet for that little computer, I thought I was in heaven - and used it to do a series on defense spending.
Today this is known as Computer Assisted Reporting, a recognized specialty that gives reporters and editors the power to sort through huge volumes of public data and write stories that might have taken months or years in the days before PCs - if they were possible to do at all. Like me, most of the people who do this are not math jocks or geeks - just reporters who want answers to questions and use computers as a tool.
After I'd bungled my way through enough of this stuff to be dangerous, I thought it might a fun sideline to share what I'd learned with readers who were still mystified by the digital world but keen to learn more about it.
As it turned out, there were and are plenty of you - enough to have rescued the column twice over the years when the bean counters threatened to kill it off. For that outpouring of support, I will always be grateful.
Alas, there aren't enough of you in general these days. Readers, I mean. Not to mention advertisers.
These are tough times for newspapers, broadcast TV stations and other traditional news outlets. We depend on readers and advertisers who have disappeared into a market fragmented by the Internet and a notion of "narrowcasting" that has chopped every medium into tinier and tinier niches.
You've probably read about the cutbacks here at The Sun and other Tribune newspapers - although our company is hardly alone in this regard. By tomorrow afternoon, more than 50 of us will exit the newsroom - about 20 percent of a staff that was already a third smaller than it was just five years ago.
