I had lost my access to a great system, but in the late 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the world of personal computing went through a dramatic transition period, bringing the first desktop machines that included a monitor or even had one built in. The Commodore PET, the Apple II, and the first IBM PC began to make computers a tool for everyone, and to make computers much more convenient for heavy users... including computer hackers. I couldn’t have been happier.