I was a Micro kid - I guess it would have been ‘89 when I started at a new school, and they had an old bomb shelter with half a dozen micros and amigas in it. T

I was a Micro kid - I guess it would have been ‘89 when I started at a new school, and they had an old bomb shelter with half a dozen micros and amigas in it. The amigas were off limits, for seniors only, but the micros were free to use in breaks, evenings after prep, sundays. None had any storage - nor was there any software - but there were heaps and heaps of BBC Micro magazines. We all taught ourselves to code, following tutorial series in magazines, swapping tips with each other, and copying games line by line from listings in magazines, modifying them or fixing (and creating) bugs as we went. Then of course the power would go off, and we’d lose everything - stuff we cared about keeping got written out with pencil on graph paper. By the time I was ten, I found basic trivial, assembler natural, the idea of everything just being a set of simple operations and reading and writing memory addresses intuitive. The same applies for all of us - our little clique of half a dozen kids who accidentally learned computer science in a bomb shelter because they wanted to play games. We made a half decent little dungeon crawler, which got us into no end of trouble when one of the masters discovered us poring over the notebook we were writing it in, as they thought we were plotting to blow up the school. Which we were - just in the game, which was about escaping school. I feel like because the computers were less accessible as utility devices, they were more accessible as computers. You had to grok the thing to do anything with it - necessity, invention, mothers and all that.