The Black-and-Green Screen: How a Commodore 64 Taught Me to Build for Real Users

Some childhood milestones are easy to date. Mine is anchored firmly in 1983, the year a beige box called a Commodore 64 entered our home and quietly rewired how I think about technology, usefulness, and leadership to this day.

My first computer was a Commodore 64, connected to a small television that doubled as a monitor. There was no hard drive—just a tape recorder for storing data, which meant loading a program involved patience, hope, and a certain tolerance for failure. A dot-matrix printer completed the setup, chattering noisily every time it produced a page.

By today’s standards, it was painfully rudimentary. But at the time, it felt magical.

I wasn’t particularly interested in games or pre-built programs. What captivated me was the idea that I could make the computer do something useful. So, I learned BASIC and started looking for problems to solve.

The best project came from my mother, an elementary school teacher. She had a practical challenge: during parent meetings, she wanted to share overall class performance—test scores and distributions—without revealing any child’s identity beyond that of the parent she was speaking with.

So I built a program.

It graphed the scores of the entire class, showing where each student fell relative to the group. Then it printed a personalized sheet for every parent: the full distribution, with only their child’s name visible. Everyone got context. No one’s privacy was compromised.

When it worked—and the printer finally finished its mechanical symphony—I remember feeling an immense sense of pride. Not because I had written code, but because something I built was genuinely useful to someone else.

That early project on a flickering black-and-green screen taught me lessons that later shaped how I approach leadership, product design, and problem-solving in business.

1. Technology only matters when it solves a real problem.

The Commodore 64 wasn’t powerful. It wasn’t fast. But it was sufficient. What mattered was that it addressed a concrete need. In business, leaders are often seduced by shiny tools, platforms, and features. But usefulness always beats sophistication.

If it doesn’t solve a real user problem, it’s just expensive noise.

2. Context is as important as content.

The brilliance of that program wasn’t the individual scores—it was the context. Parents could see how their child performed relative to the class, which made the information meaningful without being discouraging or invasive.

In leadership, data without context creates confusion or fear. Great leaders don’t just present numbers; they frame them so others can understand and act.

3. Privacy and trust are design choices.

Long before data protection became a headline, that little program enforced privacy by design. Only the right information was visible to the right audience.

In business, trust is built the same way. Whether dealing with employees, customers, or candidates, leaders must be intentional about what they disclose, to whom, and why. Trust isn’t a value statement—it’s an architectural decision.

4. The best solutions emerge when you listen closely.

I didn’t invent the problem. My mother described her challenge, and I translated it into logic and code. That skill—deep listening followed by thoughtful execution—became foundational in my later work with founders, executives, and teams.

The best leaders don’t start with answers. They start with questions.

5. Early wins create lifelong confidence.

That project didn’t turn me into a professional programmer, but it gave me something more enduring: confidence that I could learn something new and apply it meaningfully. It was proof that curiosity, effort, and empathy could combine into real impact.

That belief carried me into sales, leadership, and entrepreneurship.

The Commodore 64 is long gone, replaced by devices millions of times more powerful. But the lesson it taught me remains intact: build things that matter, for people who matter, with just enough technology to get the job done.

Sometimes leadership begins not with a grand vision, but with a black-and-green screen, a simple language called BASIC, and the desire to make someone else’s job a little easier.