The summer between second and third grade, my mom brought home an IBM PC Jr. No hard drive, 126k ram, and a 5.25″ floppy disk with the word “DOS” on it. It was a loaner from her elementary school. The principal said, “Take this home and see if it can be of any use in the classroom.”
After the first week, of it being in our house, I don’t think anyone but me touched the thing. No one else knew what to do with it. I, however, begged to go to the library. I checked out every book in the kids section that had anything to do with computers. (All five of them.) After those, I was pouring over the card index for books in the grown-ups section. It was then I discovered BASIC. Read more