I'd add that right around 1983 is sort of a special date. It was just around that time that it was becoming reasonable for a middle-class person to buy a home computer. Go back a few years from that time and you could potentially program in Basic or Fortran but you were doing so over a terminal or with punch cards and didn't really have any direct interaction with the computer except in relatively specialized situations.
1983 was when I got my first computer, a Timex/Sinclair 1000, followed up about a year later by a Commodore 64. Unlike many who had their first computing experiences then, I was already an adult, married and almost 30 years old. My experience and enthusiasm for small computers led directly to the IT career I started in 1989.
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I'd add that right around 1983 is sort of a special date. It was just around that time that it was becoming reasonable for a middle-class person to buy a home computer. Go back a few years from that time and you could potentially program in Basic or Fortran but you were doing so over a terminal or with punch cards and didn't really have any direct interaction with the computer except in relatively specialized situations.
1983 was when I got my first computer, a Timex/Sinclair 1000, followed up about a year later by a Commodore 64. Unlike many who had their first computing experiences then, I was already an adult, married and almost 30 years old. My experience and enthusiasm for small computers led directly to the IT career I started in 1989.