This is a lovely ode to the period in which I developed my love for computers. Although like many growing up east of the Atlantic Ocean, my computer of choice was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Without the budget to afford to buy much in the way of cassette-based professional software, like most I resorted to manually entering programs from magazines like Sinclair User[1] and Personal Computer World[2], which got me into the habit of reading others' code. When they were inevitably incorrectly entered, I was introduced to debugging techniques for the first time. After a while, I figured that I could write a computer program of my own; and not long after that, I realized I could submit my own program to a magazine and even earn money from it[3]! I don't think I would be working at Google now if it were not for this first-hand, somewhat unforgiving education I got in the 1980s.

That said, those who missed out on this era also missed out on quite how limited the available sources of information were. Without online services to consult, the primary source of information being trial and error, and one incorrect machine code instruction leading to loss of all data entered, progress was very slow going. A committed learner could certainly make far faster progress with a more modern environment.

For today's generation, I'm grateful for books like Charles Petzold's Code [4], which constructs a computer architecture from first principles. The joy is still there waiting to be found!

[1]: https://archive.org/details/sinclair-user-magazine-033/page/...

[2]: https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1984-01/pag...

[3]: https://archive.org/details/sinclair-user-magazine-044/page/...

[4]: https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/code-the-hidden-la...