Hello, from Midwestern USA. I grew up with an Apple II, but unfortunately had little mentorship or resources to explore programming beyond playing around with BASIC. I picked up software development as a profession in college. Filling in my knowledge gaps about the history of the early days of home computing has been fun. My interest was renewed after stumbling across the 8-bit guy years ago. I am interested in early Apple products, but also Commodore, Atari, and other systems. I wish I had more time to tinker around with real hardware.

I think retrocomputing also harkens back to a time when you owned a machine, rather than the other way around. No subscriptions, no advertising, no forced obsolescence.

My family had the Tomy Tutor as a kid, and it was pretty frustrating that I was unable to save the basic examples from the book or sprites that I spent hours designing on that awful keyboard. Without the internet, I had no idea what possibilities even existed. A few years later, we got an Apple IIe, which was a far more capable machine. Still, I found the background of this obscure machine very interesting.