While the kids were playing Doom on networked PCs at the house, I was getting work done on a TRS-80 Model 16 running Xenix. E-mail in 1983 was based on UUCP. My Xenix box was part of a nationwide network of UNIX style boxes. I put my first internet connection up in 1985 using a Xenix port of Phil Karn's amateur radio oriented "net" code. UCSD hosted my connection. It was very primitive. Telnet.FTP. Simple sendmail with internet style user@host e-mail addresses.
I think that your background is very interesting and amazing. I have to admit that most of my home networking has been for media sharing between computers that I have had connected to our televisions. I use a program called Audials that I have been using for years to record and share streamed content using Plex.
I have a large collection of vintage “home computers” and game consoles from the 1980s including Apple, Atari, Coleco, Commodore, Radio Shack/Tandy, Spectravideo, Texas Instrument and Timex along with a few other weird off-brand products. The ones that I didn’t purchase new were mostly purchased from thrift stores in the 1990s and eBay and antique stores more recently. But I never have purchased a Vic-20. I would obtain these old computers and game consoles and try to get them to work, and then and obtain software for them. It was a hobby.
My aunt and uncle owned a business where they mostly rebuilt generators, alternators, and starters for cars and trucks. My aunt was the bookkeeper for the business, and she began purchasing computer equipment for their business starting with Radio Shack/Tandy. They had a lot of money invested in the TRS-80 based system that they put together.
I think I mentioned that I had to drop out of college and work for a family business for about ten years. While I was doing that, I did manage to take some classes at Community Colleges. One of them had a bunch of TRS-80 Computers in their computer lab. So, I did get a little time on them.
Later as I was separating myself more and more from our lumber remanufacturing business, I got a work study job starting out helping students with learning disabilities but fairly quickly being able to transfer to the computer lab assistant at the downtown “business center” of another community college.
We had about two dozen IBM PC clones that were not networked together, each had its own 10MB hard drive and a 5 1/4” floppy drive for students to save their homework. If I remember correctly, these were running MSDOS 3.2 and we had a shareware-based menu system from which students picked the program that they wanted to use. The students were not given access to the command line to keep them from screwing things up.
The primary subjects being taught were Lotus 123, Word Perfect, Basic Programming and an introduction to computers in general. I still have some of the textbooks. There was only one lab assistant on duty at a time. Since the computers were not networked, and did not even have modems let alone network cards... we had to manually update each of the computers using the floppy drives. Each computer had its own set of floppies so we would do about half of them at a time when doing “maintenance” or updating them.
My job was mostly helping students with their homework although I did fill in for absent teachers fairly frequently which was not that big of a deal since most had lesson plans that they tried to follow. These computers had no access to the internet, Compuserve, AOL, email, the school network or anything else. Yet at the time I thought that those 10 Megabyte hard drive’s were amazing. That summer we vacuumed out all of the computers and upgraded all of them to “massive” 20 Megabyte hard drives.
When I had been going to Western Washington University just a few years before they had no PC’s just terminals connected to their mainframes. While I was in high school I often worked nights as a janitor for one of my bicycle racing buddies. We cleaned the offices for several businesses. One of them was the headquarters for a fairly large lumber company. They had a mainframe and terminals. We cleaned the computer room in addition to the office. I was in awe at that time. Their computer was worth a fortune, but it probably had less actual processing power than most cell phones do today.
I have never been much of a gamer myself although I do have a first-generation PlayStation that I modded so that it could use CDR disks with collections of games that were not approved by Sony. So, for a while I did become proficient with game controllers. But other than that my gaming has almost all been with a progression of flight simulators.
I like to use them with a VR headset and rudder pedals to augment the flight simulator style joystick. I actually have quite a bit of money invested in our current system, software and fleet of virtual aircraft. It is no substitute for actual flying but I do like to fly virtually into new destinations. When we are not able to fly our real airplane, like right now I do like to fly around the pattern at our home airport regularly to help keep myself proficient.