My friend Michael Gottlieb,

a professional computer programmer, suggested that I write a computer program to do the animation. He recommended that I get an Atari 800 (a machine he was familiar with):

because it had the good graphics and was relatively cheap — $500 (though I couldn’t afford even that, and Arlene Sagan kindly lent me the money to get started).

I learned how to write software for the Atari (BASIC, FORTH, 6502 assembler). Since I was planning to use the computer to create animations I’d previously intended to make by hand, I called the software I was writing The Music Animation Machine ...