> While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.

I've got a few great memories from the mid-80s...

Being on school-vacation trip with my teacher and classmates at about 11 years old and sending a letter to my mom with a BASIC program I asked her to type on my computer at home and then calling her to ask her the result of the program.

Then pedaling on my BMX clone bicycle to go meet strangers I'd meet through classified ads in a local newspaper where ads read like this (in french but I'll translate):

"Have 120 games for the C64, listing on demand. Send your listing."

At 13 years old or so, we'd buy an ad in the local newspaper and run ads like that, with our phone number and (snail) mail address.

Many games we didn't care about but we load them again and again to see and re-see the "cracktro" before the game (except they weren't yet called cracktro: the term hadn't been coined yet).

Salivating in front of shops displaying computers: but those looking too "serious", as kids we didn't dare to enter those so we'd watch through the window.

Fast-forward 10 years to the mid-nineties and I find myself working with a person whose books (in french) about computing I used to buy and read to learn about computers and programming.

These were the days.