One further step: I sat there reading BASIC books in the library but never had the correct setup to actually try them, so I would play them in my head (we had computers, just not the BASIC interpreter).
They were not that much different than a choose your own adventure book.
We had radio shows that transmitted software over the airwaves... still think that was incredible! It wasn't very reliable, though (and not very fun to listen to).
Unless you bought a c64 and realized you can't use any old tape recorder, but had to buy a proprietary (albeit much more reliable) commodore tape deck.
I had one of those. Then I got a 1541 disk drive as a gift one year. Ah, the angry look on my dad's face in the wee hours of the morning having been awakened by that obnoxious clacking sound caused by the disk drive encryption methods of the day.
When the kids who grew up on Roblox start throwing around the word "old", that's how those of use who grew up on MUDs know that we're actually old now.
Ah yes, I remember the first time I was asked--with a tad of suspicion--what a MUD is, and explaining it in terms of its graphical successors, themselves now antique, which I never touched.
Roblox is the reason I'm a developer today. To be fair, I got in on it pretty early (late '07 I think), but its been around since 2004. There are high school students current applying to college that never knew a world without it.
Feel better now?