How My Dad Got Me Started in Computer Graphics

Every origin story has a catalyst. Mine was my dad, an Apple IIe, and a stack of Nibble Magazines.

My Dad and His Love of Computers#

My father spent his career as an electronics technician — first with the Canadian Air Force, then later with Transport Canada — maintaining the test equipment used to validate landing computers at airports. The kind of work where "within specification" isn't just a phrase; it's the difference between a safe landing and a disaster. He developed a deep fascination with computers through that work, and when home computers became a reality, he was one of the first to bring one home.

Around 1985, he bought us an Apple IIe. It was expensive — really expensive by today's standards — but he saw it as essential. He also built up a library to go with it: books published by Nibble Magazine collecting their best one- and two-liners, and a running subscription to Nibble Magazine itself. He showed me a bit of AppleSoft BASIC to get me started. That was his gift to me — the machine, the books, the magazines, and that first nudge.

Learning to Code From Nibble#

Nibble was magical. Each issue was packed with small programs you could type in — little demos, really. Almost like demoscene productions, except they fit in two lines of BASIC. Two hundred fifty-six characters per line, maximum. To make the most of that constraint, you packed in compound statements, used exponential notation tricks like 9E9 to create an infinite loop, and squeezed print statements into their shortest possible form. It was a masterclass in optimization disguised as entertainment.

Nibble itself had started in 1980 in Mike Harvey's living room as a newsletter for Apple II owners. It promised to "Nibble Away" at the mysteries of the Apple II for beginning and advanced programmers alike, and it kept that promise for more than a decade. Its pages mixed games, graphics, utilities, BASIC, assembly language, and well-commented listings that made the tricks visible. For a kid trying to understand what computers could do, it was exactly the right kind of invitation.

My dad didn't have a lot of spare time, but I did. I had the machine, the books, the magazines, and the obsession. I typed in dozens of those programs. Each one taught me something new — not just syntax, but how to make a computer do things efficiently. Eventually, I started writing my own.

The Fireworks Two-Liner#

At eleven years old, I submitted a fireworks animation to Nibble's one- and two-liner contest — and won. It was published in the June 1990 issue, just a couple of months before my twelfth birthday.

My fireworks entry as it appeared in the June 1990 issue of Nibble Magazine.

The program simulated a firework: a dot climbing the screen, then fragments radiating outward in arcs, slowly fading. I worked out that sine and cosine functions traced the right kind of curves for the trajectories — so I hardcoded lookup tables to make them fast enough to animate in real time on the Apple IIe's modest processor.

In retrospect, the equations of motion would have been more physically accurate. But I didn't know them yet. Sine and cosine looked right, so sine and cosine it was. Discovering that mathematical functions could describe the physical world — and then bending those functions to fit inside 512 characters — was the moment something clicked.

What I Actually Learned#

Typed into those two-liners wasn't just code. It was a way of thinking:

• Constraints are a forcing function. Five hundred and twelve characters teaches you to think carefully about what actually matters.
• Math is a tool, not a subject. Sine and cosine weren't abstract — they were the thing that made my fireworks look right.
• Discovery beats instruction. My dad gave me a starting point and everything I needed. The real learning happened by doing — by typing, breaking, fixing, and eventually creating.

That was 1990. I was eleven. None of it would have happened without my dad.

It's a thread I've been pulling on ever since.

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This is part of a series on my early adventures in computer graphics, from Apple IIe two-liners through to Three.js, glTF, and beyond.