I have all boys who do like computer programming. My oldest is now a computer programmer and going back to school soon for a PhD in Computer Science and my middle son thought majoring in Physics is writing computer games all the time. While in grade school the kids were involved in programming robots and competing in robotics tournaments — FIRST LEGO League.
I started programming in high school when my aunt and grandmother got me a Commodore 64. The school had a TRS 80 and my senior year I was able to take a class in basic to go with what I was doing at home. The TRS 80 was a little different than my C64. The TRS 80s were hooked together in a change with the operating system coming from one main computer in the middle. I still remember one day when the whole system locked up and the teacher wasn’t in the room. I said, hey we can just pull out the disk and reboot not knowing that that every computer would need to be restarted — they were all hooked together! I finally learned how a dumb terminal worked.
There was one computer that had modem. The internet wasn’t the way it is now and bulletin board systems were the way to connect. One computer would connect at a time through a dial up modem — the BBS was on an Apple IIe computer. You could connect and leave message, kind of like a forum is now. Then hang up and later you would connect again to see if you had any messages. Our sign in was our phone number (it’s funny the things I remember)…. mine on my C64 operated at 800 bps. You could read the screen as it scrolled in new…
