people confuse what it's always like to be a teenager in every generation with what happened in the world when they were teens. "remember when everybody progra

people confuse what it's always like to be a teenager in every generation with what happened in the world when they were teens. "remember when everybody programmed in GW Basic?" no, that time never existed, but a certain set of people at a particular time in history got exposed to programming and that's what was available and understandable to them. In the fat part of the adoption curve for product lifecycles, that number of people can dwarf the number of pioneers who knew other languages like C, but their experience is not an accurate or detailed history of computer science. AOL was a blip, a big, fat blip, whereby a certain generation of teens discovered computing, and while it was important personally to some people, in no way was AOL ever important, it was just froth.