Go Surf

When I was growing up, my family was fortunate to have a computer. This alone may sound odd to folks who have grown up with a tablet or smartphone in their hands at all times, but the 1980s saw a slow and gradual expansion of computers in homes.

People didn’t really understand their wide-ranging utility, and both hardware and software were pretty user-unfriendly. To run programs, you had to understand at least a tiny bit of code yourself—at least the very basic C prompts from MS DOS, just to run programs (even games). You needed to load the program from an audio cassette tape, just like the kind on which you’d create a mixtape.

This clunky interface made people who played games on computers necessarily a bit more knowledgeable about code than, say, today’s gamers who can just log in and start playing.

Another common way to play video games on your home PC was to type the code in directly and just run the program. You could buy computer-specific magazines that had the entire game’s cod…