This takes me back. I first started studying programming when I was 14. I had discovered a programmed-instruction test book in the library that taught machine l

This takes me back. I first started studying programming when I was 14. I had discovered a programmed-instruction test book in the library that taught machine language. Not assembly language, machine language. You had to write out the instructions as numeric values, and the addresses as numeric values too. I even did a book report on the book, which forever cemented my nerd cred. Fortunately, my family moved the next year. I am still astonished that the library had that book. The town I lived in had a population of about 10,000, and the primary business was growing oranges. Later I bought myself a TRS-80. The less said about that computer, the better. In my opinion, it deservedly earned the nickname Trash-80. I bought one of the first IBM PCs. It cost more than four times what I paid for my first car. At my first job after graduating college I worked with a DEC PDP-8. It had all of 6k bytes of memory (the odd number is because it had 4k of 12-bit words). While I was there we upgraded the memory (6k more bytes for $5000, 32k bytes hard disk drive for another $5000). Occasionally I will compare the performance to cost ration of my current computer to my old IBM-PC. My current machine cost me about $1000 in parts, and it has 8G memory, and 4Tb hard drive. That's 8,000 times as much memory, and 400,000 times as much storage as the IBM-PC. And the IBM-PC cost me $3500.