One of those 'back in the day' posts, huh? I was just a kid when I started messing around with the Hewlett Packard HP-41C programmable calculator. That was an

One of those 'back in the day' posts, huh? I was just a kid when I started messing around with the Hewlett Packard HP-41C programmable calculator. That was an incredible amount of handheld power at the time. RPN and maybe 256 bytes or so to work with? Even got a little app published in the Key Notes user's club newsletter, but I'm sure it was due to my age, not the quality of the code... Then I borrowed a TRS-80 Model I book--the intro to BASIC book that came with every TRS-80. Read it over a weekend. I remember it clearly because we also installed a garage door opener that weekend. Big fun! (Looking back, a lot of the books in those days were really clear and easy to understand.) To actually try the programs I wrote (longhand, on notebook paper), I would hang out at the Radio Shack in the mall and transcribe and debug the code. The sales dudes were really cool about letting a strange and polite little boy play with the low-spec computers for an hour at a time, even if he only occasionally bought electronic components. By this time I was hand assembling Z80 code (remember peek and poke?) and they were selling the TRS-80 module III and the Coco. But you know what? As exciting as it was then, it's even better today. Free compilers and dev tools? FPGAs? More free online docs about anything than you could read in a lifetime? Places to meet, discuss, and share tricks with people all across the world? Hell, people throw away computers I would have killed for back then. The barrier to entry is so much lower than it was back then. No contest, things are freakin' great today and it's still exciting. I still have the intro to Z80 book around here somewhere.