Joe, is it possible to be a "home computing geek" these days ?

I still recall fondly the early eighties, when a multitude of companies vied for your custom, Atari, Oric, Commodore, et al (and in the UK, Amstrad)

those were the days, you had to have a smattering of BASIC even to get the machine up and running, and there were a host of magazines catering to every machine.

IBM and Bill Gates put paid to all that, sadly (well, sadly in some ways ...)