I have a vivid memory of my dad telling me how the computer we would be getting (the one with 360k ram) had more memory than we could ever possibly need. Even in those days, I can‘t say I found that to be true and obviously that‘s laughable today.

I remember typing in Basic programs from magazines (Home Computer I think?) that were thousands of lines and did stuff like display the names of rock bands that I had never heard of at the time (Judas Priest is one I remember) in 3-D. This wasn‘t a generic program; it was a program that hard-coded the lines to display “Judas Priest” in 3-D. If there was a typo, you were screwed as there was no way you would ever find it. It was good typing practice at least.

Later in high school I tried to get a job doing data entry (that was about as big as I could dream with respect to computers) and I wrote a training program in Turbo Pascal to display numbers or letters like you get on a keypad test and then timed your response and kept track of how you were doing over time. In retrospect, the writing of that program showed a far greater skill level (and was much more interesting) than anything I got out of the training. I had no idea how to leverage those skills back then. Never did get that data entry job either… :)