Wow......great story!! Just found this from one of your competition pages. I'm in the older generation computer users too. I still remember learning programming in high school with binary cards.
And then when I was first married we lived on a farm and had a dial up modem and use to connect to message boards pre internet as we know it today.
Managed to rack up a whopping $700 phone bill in the first month as we had to dial STD (Trunk)