> And, to be fair, _most_ of the kids when I was in school just wanted to play Space Invader clones and not write Basic programs. Exactly. When I was a teenage

> And, to be fair, _most_ of the kids when I was in school just wanted to play Space Invader clones and not write Basic programs. Exactly. When I was a teenager in the 80's the kids in school came in three classes: the majority who did not know what computers were or thought they were lame, a minority who dabbled in the nascent gaming scene and an even smaller minority (of maybe 5 people in a school of 1500) that was interested in programming a computer. I happened to be part of the latter minority. The gamers were all about getting the newest (cracked) games as quickly as possible. Meanwhile we were cutting our teeth on the internals of the c64. While we were lousy gamers with zero connections, we had a certain amount of respect in the gamer community because we were actually capable of programming the intro's to their cracked games. In return we got to feed on their scraps, so there was a living in that. :-)