How it all began: Apple II Compatible
"Mom, I want to learn computers." That's the first time I can recall expressing a desire to learn something to my Mom. Growing up in South Korea in the 80s, my childhood was pretty standard: lots of standardized testing, ranking by scores, and attending various hak-wons (after-school extracurricular activities or tutoring services), all of which were arranged by my mom. But the computer hak-won was different—it was the first one I wanted to sign up for myself. In those early days, I dove into Basic, learning how to create variables, add them, print results, and run the code. Soon enough, I was writing code with for-loops and if statements. It was exhilarating! I was captivated by the idea that I could command a machine to perform tasks repeatedly without tiring it out or complaint about numbers getting too large. My Apple II compatible looked just like this Then, one day, there it was—a knock-off Apple II on my desktop. It felt like magic. I remember it costing around 600...