Notes from Maine - 2025/04/13

I traveled out of Maine last week—that’s something I never do. I think I made it all the way through 2024 without leaving Maine once. I didn’t get very far. I went with my friend Chip down through a tiny piece of New Hampshire and then into Massachusetts. Still, if you consider my “comfort zone” to extend only about 10 miles around this house, it was definitely out of my comfort zone. I was invited to return to our region’s biggest pinball event so I could speak about a rewrite of a machine from 1980, called Black Knight. That machine has always been one of my favorites. 

Computer programming grabbed me at an early age. Us kids were not allowed to sit at home all summer after Mom went to work, so she signed me up for computer classes at the Career Center. I guess they didn’t have an age requirement on the class, or perhaps she lied. Everyone else in the class was in their twenties. I was at least 12. Maybe 13? I think 12. When I was 13 she sent me down to Duke for a computer camp, and this would have been the summer before that. We took a field trip from the computer camp over to an IBM datacenter where they had rendered the animations for Tron. I heard Abracadabra by Steve Miller that summer too. So that was 82 and the summer before was the Career Center. 

At the Career Center, we were learning Fortran and COBOL. Those are two programming languages that were more than 10 years older than I was, so they were already ancient when I learned them. The computers were old too. I had to type out my programs on punch cards and then carefully keep them in order to feed them into the punch card reader. I was still putting line numbers at the beginning of each line. A twenty-something next to me leaned over and whispered that my line numbers made me look like a novice. They were something that I had carried over from my years of hacking around in BASIC. I nodded, but my fingers were incapable of not starting lines with identifying numbers. 

The joke was on him later that week. He dropped his cards and had to sort them by hand. Our instructor told us that they had a sorting program on the card scanner that could re-order them if he had just put line numbers at the beginning of each line! 

I was fine at the programming part of the class, but the vocabulary the people used was baffling. We had to write a program to calculate the “amortization table” for a “mortgage.” I barely knew what a mortgage was. The line-number guy was kind enough to explain to me how to use the formula for the amortization.

At lunch, all those guys would go out near the loading dock, eat their bag lunch, and smoke. I would run down the street to the arcade. That’s where Black Knight resided—the pinball machine that I gave my presentation on last week. I was absolutely mystified by that machine. It spoke. It had the best sounds and a two-level playfield with four flippers. It had a three ball multiball. If you played a two-player game, the winner would get bonus time where you could plunge as many times as you could in 99 seconds and score extra points. If someone else was already playing, I would approach timidly and put my quarter on the glass. That’s how you would challenge someone to the next game. I didn’t win much back then.

The game was so overwhelming that I couldn’t even really understand everything that was going on. It took me years before I could look at a playfield and predict the way a ball might travel. Back then, it was pretty much magic.

A couple of years ago, Chip brought a Black Knight pinball machine to my house. I made a circuit board a few years ago that lets me retrofit new rules onto older machines, so I set to work. With people who care about such things, my version went over well. At the end of the conference, as we were getting ready to pack the machine back up and return to Maine, an older gentleman came through the side door of the conference hall to have a smoke near the loading dock. 

I recognized him immediately. No, it wasn’t the young man who explained amortization tables to me forty years ago. The man I met outside the convention was Steve Ritchie. He worked for Williams pinball back in the day and he was the person who designed Black Knight. It was his voice, encoded in an eerie way, that comes from the pinball machine’s speaker, saying, “I CHALLENGE THEE TO FIGHT ME.” I introduced myself. He nodded, and gave me a fist bump. He probably had that same interaction 1,000 times that day. It was memorable for me.