Buckle up
I’m writing this in 2023. I figure, if you’re too young to be President of the United States (less than 35 years old), you probably can’t imagine what it was like before the Internet. I’m a 1974 model. When I was six, my grandparents left their TRS-80 home computer at our house, to watch it for them while they went on vacation. They also left the manual. I read it. I learned how to use BASIC to write a program. That was it. I was hooked. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. My parents bought it for me shortly after my encounter with the TRS-80, because they could see how entranced I was. Obsessed, really. For whatever reason, I got computers. The goal was always to push the machine’s boundaries, to see what I could make it do. Even on these very early machines, whose capabilities were laughable by today’s standards, their possibilities seemed endless to me. There was a universe contained inside a small box. I would invent a project for myself, then another. Most went unfinished, ...