Hi Tim, I think your comment — like some others before you — highlights how different things were in the US compared with Malaysia, where I lived throughout the 1980s (and where I’m still living).

My dad — a boomer — had an Apple II before he had me, which he used to computerise his business. He was definitely one of the very few who’d bought one, an Apple II cost the equivalent of a year’s wages in Malaysia back in the day. I was lucky in that I learned to program in BASIC on the Apple IIe (that replaced the original Apple II later on at home). None of that was taught in school, my parents had to find a local computer science professor who moonlighted giving computer classes in the evenings. All age groups, all skill levels, because that’s the only way he could have enough numbers to justify running a class.

I only got my first modem (14.4kbps) in 1993 (or was it 1994?) and even that took a family trip to Singapore to pick it up because it wasn’t widely available in Malaysia. That’s how I joined the BBS scene in Malaysia which, again, was tiny, and it didn’t take long to know all the people involved (racking up thousands in phone bills, but hey). It was at that point that I learned of all the resources available in Europe and the US, and envied what you guys had, but of course by the time I moved on to Europe, things had changed considerably. These days the gap between countries isn’t so wide.