Microsoft this week unveiled an amazing new initiative called DreamSpark, which allows college-age students to freely download some of the company’s most popular development and design software.

It’s truly an astounding deal: Students now have easy access to Visual Studio 2008, Expression Studio and a bunch of other tools that pros around the world use to build the software we all buy. Visual Studio alone costs hundreds of dollars in stores. So if you’re a budding Bill Gates, or know one in your family, check out the DreamSpark site for details.

In a video interview about DreamSpark on Microsoft’s student-oriented Channel 8 blog, Billg himself noted:  "These are the tools people can build a career around—or they can just build fun software for themselves….There’s nothing more fun than thinking about software."

Ah, software. I have to admit the announcement made me a bit nostalgic. Today I mostly write about computers, not code them. But there was a time when a deal like this would have made me drool.

A geek is born

The first lines of computer code I ever composed, on a mail-order  Sinclair ZX-80, didn’t exactly herald genius. I think they went something like this:

10 Print "Hi"

20 Goto 10

It was 1980. I was an 11-year-old kid in Pennsylvania playing with his first PC. And as far as I was concerned, this cheap-looking hunk of plastic, stuttering "Hi" on my small black-and-white TV, was pure magic.  It was the start of a life-long passion for all things silicon.

Before long, I’d ditched the Sinclair for an Atari 800 (prying open the Sinclair to see how it worked turned out to be a bad move).

Holed up in my room with phone-book-thick copies of BYTE magazine and a 6502 programming book, I gradually taught myself to code crude Asteroids knock offs and other simple games. (6502 was the name of the Atari’s 8-bit microprocessor "brain"—the same chip found in both the Apple I and Apple II.)

Being Bill Budge

Other kids I knew were obsessed with rock stars or outfielders. My hero was a guy named Bill Budge, the wizard behind the Pinball Construction Set. A game within a game, PCS essentially allowed you to build your own pinball machine. To me, it was pure programming genius.

I dreamed of creating software like that, or like one of the other games I played every day after school: Castle Wolfenstein, Ultima, Wizardry, and Microsoft’s Olympic Decathlon.  Anybody else remember that one? My friend Wiley and I used to spend long Saturday afternoons bashing the keyboard on his dad’s Apple II, trying to set new world records.

It’s funny where the roads in life can lead. In college, I decided I wanted to write about technology rather than create it (a few Ds in chemistry and calculus helped provide career clarity). And that’s what happened: I spent the next 15 years covering science and technology at various newspapers and magazines.

Now I’m back where my 8-bit dreams all started. At Microsoft, one of my jobs is to help develop the next generation of Windows, working alongside teams of programmers with their own Bill Budge-like powers.

I’d like to think that 11-year-old kid back in Pennsylvania would have been impressed.

 <Michael Stroh>