My memory isn't great but I seem to remember that I bought my first computer, a Commodore 64, during the holidays of 1982. I was in my 30's and completely fascinated with technology. I learned to program in PET (Commodore) BASIC and even wrote my own rudimentary word processor and spreadsheet with it. I also spent hours copying machine code from Commodore magazines and saving it to cassette tape drive. (A floppy drive would follow later.) When I finished creating my word processor, I used create and to print out letters using the dot-matrix printer. I felt so proud of having a real computer. Why do I mention this? Because it has just been announced that smartphone is being release with Commodore branding.
In high school 82-83 - our computer room had 2 Commodore SuperPETs with floppy drives and about a dozen Apple IIs. We learned PASCAL. As you did, I also remember copying BASIC from magazines - one guy would read out the code and the other would type. Also, back then it was called programming not coding.
My dad bought a C= 64 when I was in the 5th grade. I used that machine all through middle school and high school and partway through college until I bought a Pentium 100 with Windows 95.
@Jay2TheRescue: Now I feel VERY old. You got the C64 in 5th grade, which I'm assuming was the early 1980's. That means I'm old enough to be your father. My daughters were born in 1976 and 1981.
Does anyone remember the earlier version of the C64, the VIC-20? I bought 1 for my kids in 1981 but I used it more than them. I wrote a basic program to solve cryptograms. I was using FORTRAN programming at work so Basic was an easy transition. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20
We're both dating ourselves, but yes, I remember. I also remember my kids having the PET computers in schools.
