[Ricardus]

It was definitely fun to go to the computer lab in high school and play with/program the Commodore PETs. These were the 4K models with the chicklet keyboard.

I will say this though. I disagree with one word in the author's text. He said the machines of the time were "constrained." They weren't constrained at all. They had limitations just like today's machines do. But we weren't aware of the limitations because we weren't time travelers coming from the future with more computing power in our pockets than most corporations had in 1983.

In fact the exact opposite was true. The computer industry was bursting at the seams. It was exploding. It was not constrained at all.

Then they cloned the IBM PC and the rest is history. Every machine you're reading this post on descended from those.