Author here. I thought my wordpress stats are broken, when instead of the usual 3-10 vitits it showed 3800 :'). Thank you. A personal background: writing this

Author here. I thought my wordpress stats are broken, when instead of the usual 3-10 vitits it showed 3800 :'). Thank you. A personal background: writing this article was fun! I started with BASIC too, I was about 6, and the Amstrad CPC6128 my dad had was 8 already. You can tell by how I treat Locomotive BASIC like a reference implementation of the 80s. I knew Pascal only from a label on diskette 5 (but someone replaced it with invoices), listings from 80s Bajtek magazine stash that I mostly got from a friend (he had an Atari 65XE but was switching to a... Pentium III 500Mhz), and the manual for the Amstrad and having A LOT of free time were my source of knowledge. I remember trying to replicate (in BASIC!) the UI of first computerized cash registers from the shops, when I was 12. I knew Dijkstra made the quote, but never before asked myself: when did he do it? Was it the BASIC I know? What did people use, probably just assembly, right? Wrong! It's amazing how much old documents, newsletters, and documentation you can find from the 70s, and how many the problems it did not change that much today, even though the computers changed incredibly. I'll read through the comments here, and for sure won't miss any on the site itself.