Hacker News Reader

One further step: I sat there reading BASIC books in the library but never had the correct setup to actually try them, so I would play them in my head (we had computers, just not the BASIC interpreter).

They were not that much different than a choose your own adventure book.

"Mom! Why did you turn off the computer! YOU LOST ALL MY WORK!"

Was there too.

You didn't have an analog tape recorder hooked up to your TI basic computer that only worked 20% of the time to save your games? Pffff

Unless you bought a c64 and realized you can't use any old tape recorder, but had to buy a proprietary (albeit much more reliable) commodore tape deck.

I had one of those. Then I got a 1541 disk drive as a gift one year. Ah, the angry look on my dad's face in the wee hours of the morning having been awakened by that obnoxious clacking sound caused by the disk drive encryption methods of the day.

We had radio shows that transmitted software over the airwaves... still think that was incredible! It wasn't very reliable, though (and not very fun to listen to).

The magazine is a permanent medium.

And mdemare was the loader.