Long, long ago when I was in high school during the early 1980's, personal computers were just coming into existence. Back then, I had taken on Basic programming as a high school student. In those days, the PC of choice was the Radio Shack TRS-80 --- this was just a couple of years before the introduction of the first Apple computer. In those dark days before the Internet and before Microsoft, the only software choices we had were retail programs that could cost hundreds of dollars, or cheap .