My childhood was PCBoard, POV-Ray, then later Lightwave, 3ds Max, Bryce. WADs, Hammer Editor, GTkRadiant, both of the scenes. Sierra and Lucasarts games... Turbo Pascal!

I never understood why Microsoft didn't have affordable licences to encourage kids to program.

The school computer lab had Visual Basic but you only got an hour week in there as part of the computing subject, the school library computers couldn't have it because the licence was per seat not per site.

You really only had QBASIC which was great but we really wanted to write Windows apps. You'd be up for a thousand dollars for a MSDN academic subscription just to get Visual Basic.

I guess the blessing was instead of Windows apps we made web pages and JavaScript games hosted on our parents ISP webhost accounts while we dreamed of the day we'd have enough money to buy our own .com domain.

That smell thing is so real. I still get hit with it randomly and I'm immediately 10 years old again

You seem to be writing about me :) I also lived a very similar childhood. Class 10 computer science Board paper I prepared using pen and paper computing only. The only difference is that I had BASIC, instead of LOGO. Another difference is that I was not in an industrial town. Since sometimes you write in your posts about growing up in a small industrial town. I have a hunch you grew up in Jamshedpur in Jharkhand state.

Actually in 1982 I was able to store my programs on standard audio cassettes. Hardware needed: a modem and a cheap tape recorder. My apple II modem would chirp the ascii binary like Starwars' R2D2, I'd record that and when needed I'd play it back to the modem.

Also, on Logo, it's like the jump from C64 basic or CP/M Basic to VB6 but on steroids. UCB logo and manuals can be up to an SICP-lite level.

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html

Ah, yes, moving a turtle and yaddah yaddah. Yes, you have it, and material on par (I am no kidding) to "Intro to symbolic computation" from the Common Lisp world. The 3rd volume can be hardcore compared to what I learnt in Elementary with Logo.

> These are expensive machines

Impressive how that part changed. Today, many computers are cheaper than the desk they are sitting on. Many companies pay over $2000 for office furniture, and that's not even fancy. A $1000 laptop sits on top of it.

Furniture made by an actual cabinet maker will easily get to $5000+. About the price of a maxed out gaming rig, or an enterprise level workstation.

Some of my fondest memories as a young kid was hacking away at an 800mhz machine my dad bought me. Certainly a lot of time was wasted, but my knowledge of the system was also helped a bit.

Seeing kids nowadays interfacing with just a touch screen makes me fearful that a foundation of knowledge is not being built, even among the more nerdy types.

I had many similar experiences, but almost a decade earlier. At grade school we had Apple 2s with Logo, Oregon Trail and other education classics. My junior high was a small parochial school that still had TRS-80s in 1988, along with some apples. My freshman year of high school was in a well funded district in Chicago suburbs. They had Macs with Excel and Word - we wrote lab reports in science classes with our data input and graphed in excel and the graphs pasted into the word doc reports - in 1990.