I remember being a kid with my Apple //c and green-on-black monochrome monitor. Each had a handle so I could take them places, and I did. I took it to my grandparents’ house and back home, to programming competitions and back, and so on. It was a really portable computer. Two pieces, two power cables, display cable (just a simple composite RCA-style cable).
What did I do? Well, I played games (Karateka was fantastic at the time) and I coded a bit in BASIC, taking programs out of Byte or whatnot and hacking them up to do fun things (I even wrote a functional suspend/restore app using PEEK and POKE — and that’s trickier than it sounds as you don’t want to POKE over your restore program but you DO want to restore the old program to memory, so tricks were made that I’ve long since forgotten the details of).
Which is to say, what I did with the computer I lugged around in elementary school was gaming and coding. What do I do today with my MacBook Pro? Gaming and coding.
Sigh.
