I'll admit it: I *love* code. Computers are magic, and since my first taste as a 5 year old, I've been pretty well hooked on them. When I started with them, they weren't like the toaster appliances they are now, and learning to become the wizard beh...
In 1983, my father bought an Apple IIe. He used it to access stock market data from his home office in London, using an acoustic coupler to dial into a computer bank in the States which would let him retrieve market prices for any ticker symbol he cared to look up.
OK, that was probably not English unless you're a computer historian or a computer geek born before the 80s.
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An Apple IIe. By AlejandroLinaresGarcia - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23455042
That's a 1MHz CPU and 64KB of RAM, a 5.25" floppy disk drive, and a 280x192 pixel green/black monochrome screen. To put that in context, an iPhone 6s has a dual core 1.8GHz (1800MHz) CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 1334x750 screen and fits in my pocket.
An acoustic coupler modem is like your DSL or cable internet box, except that you put the handset of a telephone on it and connect it directly to your computer, and then it would take the digital signal your computer wants to transmit to another computer and play each bit of data back as a tone. On the other end, another computer interpreted that tone back into a bit of data. A common speed for that would be 300 baud - that's 300 bits per second. That iPhone's radio modem can hit 300Mbit/s. That's a million times more data per second, without wires.
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An acoustic coupler modem. By Lorax at English Wikipedia - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1129377
OK, so I've bored you with some hardware history, but the point is just to give you a sense of what technology was like back then, because most people I know either never experienced that era of computing or forgot about it.
I was pretty young back then, though, so I got to use that computer under supervision only, and even then only for playing really simple video games, but this was an early glimpse into the magic of computers. Someone dreamed up this crazy idea that instead of making fixed circuitry that solved problems, you could write software, load it into a general purpose computer, and it would run. And then you could load different software into the same computer, and do something else with it. Something like getting up to date stock prices and executing market orders from across an ocean, or translating button presses into moving a little dot around the screen to shoot up alien invaders. Or reading text describing the world you see before you and typing in English commands to direct your character to explore this amazing adventure world. "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." I spent far too much time playing Zork (although not in 1983, lest anyone who knows my age do the math) and living in the adventure world.
