Me too! In that article there is a cover of BYTE mag with the pirate ship on it, and I remember reading that in my best friend's basement while listening to the radio and drinking Pepsi out of a glass bottle! I shot him a text just now with the pic of that magazine.

Fuck those times were awesome!

My biggest regret tho, is that even tho I was fairly interested in computers then, I was more interested in girls. So I fucked around with girls all my teens and 20's instead of riding the tech wave and having it for a career. Got my gf pregnant at 17, and had to start working a factory job butchering turkeys and chickens. (Obviously I don't regret having my children, just saying I could have been smarter about it.)

Now I'm retired and making up for lost time by becoming the biggest tech nerd ever, and fucking embracing all of it all day: AI, Lemmy, PieFed, Mastadon, Linux, Racket, Python, Java, Lua, etc... LMAO

It's either that or pickelball all day! But fuck that noise, I wanna be an old computer punk pirate, shitposting and annoying the hell out of young Lemmys for the rest of my days. Considering the number of bans I have, all because I'm a socialist anarchist, my plan seems to be working! :)

Me too. I upgraded my apple ][ clone to have 2 8.5 in drives for a whopping 1.3k or MB (forget for sure amount) per drive and ran a BBS/DND game for years.