I remember getting my 300 baud modem and thinking how quick it was compared to my first which was a 110 baud. Text would just fly across the screen line by line. Lol Had fun with the PDP10 when I was young and my Father was still in night school. First computer I built was an Altair 8080....anyone remember the "If Santa had an Altair he would be possibe" ads? Tried to get my High School to buy one but they said that toys like that weren't the future. Saw the Popular Electronics Cosmac Elf article and built one of those. Built a home brew backplane Z80 computer out of wire wrapped proto boards next. That was exhausting but it was fun. At one time I knew most of the Z80, 8080, and 1802 machine instructions and programmed them in binary. When the PC came out and then anyone could buy a computer and software without any electronics or programming background or ability I lost most interest. Also, the instruction sets grew to the sizes that it just wasn't possible to code in machine language anymore and even assembler became more difficult. Basic and DOS weren't that bad because they were still close to the processor and you could direct access all the peripherals and IO directly. Windows however evolved to try to cut you completely off of direct access with the "lord of the rings" architecture, although it is fun (avoiding the BSOD) to code drivers to do your bidding completely in the lower rings without operating system awareness. Those were the fun days. Anyone remember phone phreaking?
(yeah right),,,, 
