One Christmas morning – must have been more than 30 years ago – my dad produced a box. In the box, was a Commodore 64. The 8 bit home computer was the first computing machine that made it into our home, back in a pre-internet era.
The computer was connected to an small CRT television set. When we turned it on, a cyan-on-blue prompt shimmered “READY“.
We kids would then ask: “LOAD“. The reply came, “PRESS PLAY TO START“. At that point, we’d press play on the cassette reader.
You might not even remember cassettes, but they were all the rage. We used them to store things like pac-man.
So, we’d press play on tape.
And wait.
And wait.
And maybe, after a couple of minutes, we’d get pac-man.
Or not: often, something went wrong with tapes. And then the machine would spit out a dreadful error. You’d have to literally rewind the tape and start again.
In the many minutes of loading pac-man, I started reading the little book that also was in the box, the “User Manual”. In chapter two, the User Manual started to discuss how to “program your computer”. It taught you how to teach the computer how to say “I LOVE MY COMMODORE”. This cheerful enchantment started me to the wonders of computer programming, and eventually to a career in software.
In 1974, Brian Kernighan, having invented UNIX with Ken Thompson, and in the process the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie, wrote in their classic K&R book an example program that was basically the equivalent of my “I LOVE MY COMMODORE” one, except it became wildly more notorious. Kernighan wrote, as a first example, a program that wrote the sentence: “Hello, world!”.
Since then, millions of programmers starting to learn hundreds of different programming languages have produced the famous sentence. So much that it has become a trope in software engineering.
So, it’s only appropriate, that I start with: “Hello, World!”