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“I just grew more and more fascinated with this new interest of mine, ” Wallace Detwiler says in explaining the key reason he shifted from his work as a literary agent into the entirely new field of computer programming. What first fired his imagination in the field were the computer games played both at arcades and on the small, new personal computers. He was struck by the sudden, meteoric rise in popularity of the games that developed in the 1980s, a time by which he had become well established as a literary agent. Games that caught on in those years could be enormously profitable to their originators, Wallace noted. He used the notion of possibly writing such games himself to justify the cost ofgetting a personal computer. But he admits as deeper reasons that the games and computers just seemed enormously interesting to him. The more he played with the computer and learned how to write programs for it in the "BASIC" computer language, the more he thought he might like to m...