This stylish machine brings back memories. My childhood best friend had one of these. My family had a Commodore 64. When I was in 4th grade I wrote a Caesar cip

This stylish machine brings back memories. My childhood best friend had one of these. My family had a Commodore 64. When I was in 4th grade I wrote a Caesar cipher encryption program [1] using a description of the cipher from an encyclopedia and hacked-together fragments of BASIC from magazines and the programmer's reference guide [2]. It took me a week to make it work at all. It was my first substantial program that I can recall. Afterward, instead of trading notes with my friend at school, we could trade floppy disks with our secret notes [3]! With neither of us being touch typists, and our computers being at home rather than school, this was altogether a far more expensive, cumbersome, and high latency method of communication. I think we traded notes maybe 2 or 3 times in total after I actually had the program working. I remember this project with fondness whenever I have written a script for a task that I repeat only once or twice, which still happens with some regularity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher [2] https://archive.org/details/c64-programmer-ref https://archive.org/details/c64-programmer-ref [3] That was once I provided a long handwritten note about how to actually use my invention.