It's hard to capture for a modern audience. It's not just, say, the tutorial books that were packed in with the home computers (the curious might try one of th

It's hard to capture for a modern audience. It's not just, say, the tutorial books that were packed in with the home computers (the curious might try one of the ones for the Apple II, Atari 8-bits, or Commodore 64 with an emulator. The one for the VIC-20 is also charming.) but the whole ecosystem of books and magazines. Plus it was a lingua franca like Matlab or Python. Gian-Carlo Rota's ODE book has a nice simple 4th order Runge-Kutte implementation in BASIC, for example.