Microsoft, Apple, Google, and today's kid coders

Computers are interwoven into the fabric of our culture. Today's children, comfortably entangled in this technological world, code and create blissfully unaware that programming was once reserved for a niche group of nerds.

As a kid growing up in the 1970s and '80s, I remember when my mother's clunky LED calculator with glowing red numbers was advanced consumer technology. There was no DirectTV, no streaming video, and no mainstream internet.

This was a time before cell phones. If we needed to make a phone call while in public, we stepped into a phone booth, dropped a dime into the slot and dialed the phone number we'd previously memorized. (Yes, we remembered phone numbers back then.) If someone answered, great; if not, nothing answered. There was no voicemail, and answering machines with the tiny little tapes weren't even a thing. Computers certainly were not interwoven into the fabric of our culture, as they are today.

Interacting with a computer during the '70s was something we kids did in our imaginary play if at all. An actual computer was one of those big metal things on TV that beeped a lot, had a bunch of blinking lights and twirling tape reels and that did really important things, like guide rockets into space.

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