the late 70's and the 80's where a blast!, seriously!, we had so much that was new back then, and loads of people trying to make their mark, we saw the first of EVERYTHING, first raytracers, first music software, first digitized speech, first frame grabs, first computer generated effects, first 3d games, home coders EVERYWHERE, first modems, first internet, first hard drives, it was like everything you ever use on a modern computer was just being born.
I recall spending hours working out how to render fractals (new at the time), compression algorithms where all new, I even invented my own, GUI's where new (I made a joystick controlled one for the spectrum), encryption was something new, there was SO much going on, and the best thing was, you had just as good a computer at home as a lot of the researchers in these fields had, it was a none stop rush, I LIVED for code, in fact it got so bad I started to think in assembler, had to take a break.
it was an awesome time to be in on it, we built our own hardware, software, protocols, I get a buzz just rambling on about it, unfortunately, once big money got in on it the small software houses crumbled, standards emerged, and MS and Apple took over supplying the worlds computing needs, after that it started to go downhill, the hobbyist scene dwindled, and finally my beloved A1200 died the death and I turned to the dark side, PC's and the current software world are seriously BORING compared to what we had
now! when I was a young man..........