I suddenly feel spoiled, only having had to connect a Tandy CoCo ROMPAK to a dual 5.25" external floppy, boot a secondary OS that could utilize that drive, and then browse a directory tree to play my Disney edu-tainment game from Sierra. I do remember early BBSes where you had to set the 300/600/1200/2400 baud switch on the external dial before connecting so the modems could talk.

Oh, I remember this. We had somehow acquired a book that was about an inch thick with code that promised to produce something like Donkey Kong. My mom was up for it, I think to practice her typing, and so she spent about three nights at the Commodore while my brother and I paced behind her asking when she would be done. I think we knew it was impossible but if Mom was gonna give it a try maybe there was hope! Hope came a few months later in the form of a cassette drive that meant we could play a lame version of Donkey Kong … after a 20-minute load time. The future had arrived!

I got my Commodore PET in 1979 or so?!? I remember Compute! magazine. I even got one of my terrible games I wrote in BASIC in it :-) sometime after October 1981 because i was jealous of my friend Ron's game was in the Oct 1981 issue :-) https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue17/188_1_MATCH_A_GAME_OF_MEMORY_AND_TIMING.php

I remember getting one of these magazines back in the day and typing the program in and......it didn't work. And that was it. The program never worked. So I probably played some more Lode Runner instead.

We received a TI-94A as a Christmas gift from my aunt & uncle from Texas. We never did have a storage device, so the typed-in BASIC programs were only in-memory and gone when the power was turned off.

My brother discovered that he loved to code, so he worked on creating Q-Bert, and he made very clear to the family that no one was to touch the computer. For days. I remember seeing the game scape laid out, and I think he had a character jumping between platforms before he eventually shut things down. Pretty impressive!