Circa 1981 I was in the 5th grade and had a special class once or twice a week along with a handful of the other top math students in my school where we were taught to program in BASIC on Apple II computers. I was unaware f the wonderfulness that was even then beginning to emerge "online" - at CompuServe, which is the service featured in this video clip - and later at AOL (and elsewhere).
Looking back at it now it strikes me as remarkable how much changed so quickly over the ensuing years.
Does anyone have any 80s computing nostalgia to share? [YouTube - thanks, Tim!]
The prices she mentions at the end are outrageous. No wonder my mom couldn't afford it.
I remember clock-chipping some of the very computers shown in that little video, the TRaSh-80s. That's overclocking, done the hard way - with a soldering iron. Then there was the assembly language I learned to put together a somewhat respectable sounding mono-phonic synthesizer out of a CoCo II. It was painful, but wouldn't have been possible with basic I dont' think.
All that before I was 10. Goodness how the time flies.