> It's easy to hear "Oh well I only had 640kb of memory and typed programs out of a magazine I got in the mail!"

Since I was there (young, but there), I want to point out that this crosses three eras which all felt quite different:

    1978: typed programs in from a magazine or loaded from a cassette (16kB, TRS-80)
    1983: loaded programs from a floppy (64kB, Apple ][ and C64 etc)
    1988: loaded programs from a hard disk (640kB, IBM PC and Mac).