For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.
I was standing on the shoulders of other science fiction writers like William Gibson, who had written 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter before home computers even really existed, and Neal Stephenson who wrote 'Snow Crash' in the early '90s and imagined an online virtual world before the birth of the modern Internet.
After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.
Though many people mistakenly credit IBM with the first PC in 1981, the Apple II came out four years earlier, in 1977.
Kids are finding out about the potential for discovery online from other sources; many of them have computers at home, for instance, or their friends have them.
We didn't know the importance of home computers before the Internet. We had them mostly for fun, then the Internet came along and was enabled by all the PCs out there.
Computers sort of came around through games and toys. And you know, the first computer most people had in the house may have been a computer to play 'Pong,' a little microprocessor embedded, and then other games that came after that.
My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II.
My favorite computer of all time? The Apple II that got me started, of course.
It's often hard to remember that the personal computing era is still quite young. It only dates from 1977, with the arrival of the first mass-market PCs.
The '80s were a really different time for kids. Technology has changed so much of how we stay in touch and keep tabs on people. Back then, as a kid, you could really just do whatever you wanted until your parents got home.
