Science Fiction to computer programmer to Computer hobbyist

Around 1958 I had been reading a lot (especially summers when it got more boring) starting about 1957 when I was 9 years old. So, I went from books like Dr. Dolittle, Freddy the Pig etc. with Hugh Lofting and progressed through many fantasy adventures as well as Classics Illustrated comic books that put the classics in comic book form on to discovering first Robert Heinlein, then Isaac Asimov, then Arthur C. Clark, then Robert Silverburg, Larry Niven and many other great Science fiction authors. I found myself greatly influenced by "Stranger in a Strange Land" and thought the idea of Grokking (completely understanding others intuitively) was a really great idea. In fact, my 2nd wife did this with everyone she met whether she wanted to or not. Completely understanding everyone when you meet them is a pretty overwhelming experience for Empaths and difficult to deal with. I would prefer not to have this ability. So, I have always preferred just to know what I need to know to survive any encounter with any human being, being, animal or bird. I find this much more useful unless someone becomes a really good friend.

In my teens I got interested in Star Trek on TV and then became interested in building an ideal female robot for companionship. I also had the idea of people buying a robot to work for them so they wouldn't have to so they could play and just have their robot work in place of them.

However, when I started to learn more about computer programming and technology I soon found out we weren't anywhere near that capacity yet. We didn't even have microchip technology developed enough yet to do that. You might have a radio controlled female robot that would function a lot like a remote control plane then but that would be about it technologically speaking.

So, when I learned this I was very discouraged because I saw from the way technology was in 1966 to 1970 when I was a computer programmer in college and in business that what I was interested in likely wouldn't be possible for another 50 years.

Now what I thought of is just beginning to be possible around the world. However, now I'm retired and have had to give up that idea for the most part as a part of the dreams of my youth. Besides, I have also come to accept women for being who they actually are as a completely different species than men are. People want to say men and women are the same. They are definitely not the same thing at all.

They are equal but completely different in every single way.

So, when I got married and had children I taught my children to program in Basic language on a TRS-80 that I bought from radio shack in 1978. Then in 1987 I bought our first PC which was an IBM clone AT and Epsom printer for about $2500 then in silicon valley. I then taught all my children (the older ones) who were all teenagers by the MS-DOS in addition to Basic language in which they could program games. At that time MS-Dos also allowed basic programming modes as well to program things. However, when things moved to Windows and then Windows 95 and beyond what you could actually do became less and less as a programmer. So, users sort of got more and more screwed by ever new operating system as the systems became dumber and dumber and users became more manipulated and more manipulated by companies in every single way and by hackers more and more.

So, now users are sort of like a food group for hackers around the world and most users don't realize that they are victims of various kinds every day they go online worldwide.
This is what a TRS-80 from radio shack looked like. It had only 4k memory that only worked when it was on. So, you had to store all programs you wrote or bought on cassette tapes and then send them into the computer when it was on once again. I taught my kids how to design their own games with it so they did that then starting in 1980. Here is a picture of a TRS-80 that Radio Shack put out in 1978: