Certainly more interesting nerd circles back then - I ran a Commodore Users Group, a BBS, and enjoyed programming a bit. Tried to submit some articles to magaz

Certainly more interesting nerd circles back then - I ran a Commodore Users Group, a BBS, and enjoyed programming a bit. Tried to submit some articles to magazines in the day... no luck though. Besides the computer nerds like me, you would find the other groups that used computers for their interests, like Ham Radio operators, Educators, Small Business Operators, Writers, and Parents which provided interesting perspectives. Some of them got hooked and explored more like trying out BBSes, or trying to get the most out of word processing, those that didn't get it either stayed just with what they needed or went back to pre-digital methods. Given that group; reading early home computing magazines magazines like Creative Computing you got to see a lot of articles exploring people trying to implement computer solutions for their varied interests (i.e. cataloging a stamp collection, tracking the farm's vet schedules, etc.) Programs and methodology were not as developed so even the most basic thing could be a struggle to build it up from scratch (you need what sort of storage??) As far as the nerds there were various nerd clicks from home hobbyists, college educated, old time professional, entrepreneur, know-it-alls, and of course the religions: Apple ][, Atari, Commodore, TRS-80, CP/M. etc. Lot of division with many truly beliving "you can't possibly do X on machine Y!" etc. Even though there are still seperate platforms, a lot of it is just the same software/development tools, just different computing hardware (which also isn't all that different as it was then). My suggestion for a good feel is go to the Internet Archive's Computer Magazine rack ( https://archive.org/details/computermagazines https://archive.org/details/computermagazines ) and start reading through stuff from the mid 70s - mid 80s especially magazines like BYTE, Interface Age, Kilobaud Microcomputing, Creative Computing, Compute!, Couple of Other documents - https://archive.org/details/ted-nelson-computer-lib-dream-machine/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/ted-nelson-computer-lib-dream-ma... - https://archive.org/details/TheCompleatComputer/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/TheCompleatComputer/mode/1up?vie...