I was in high school in the early 80's... during a major transition in computing. I first took a "data processing" class. They had these things twice the size of a typical refrigerator laying on it's side. They had a teal looking color typical of a lot of industrial machinery of the 60's. I can barely remember even dealing with them, but I do remember punch hole cards that were like 4x12 heavy stock. Slightly rounded corners, and punched small rectangular holes. Then the data processing classes were changed to "computing" and my high school of close to 5 thousand students got FOUR TRS-80's, and a teacher who apparently took a summer class himself...with zero experience... attempted to teach Basic. All I remember was kids passing around a simple command w/ some "if's" and "ands" and "goto" and whatever else it was. The result was you could make any word or phrase take over the whole screen, repeating itself over and over. That was ALL I got out of school and computers. In college, I unfortunately took classes in practically everything under the sun, except computers. Who knew. (besides everyone but me it seems) Lol
Edit: btw, those TRS-80's were connected to a cassette recorder which was connected to a telephone. So was that the dawn of the Internet? I remember the tapes and phone both making screeching digital tones.
Somewhat related..while touring in the early 90's, (I was the tour mgr)our soundman had a gizmo he called his "chinger". You could hold it to the receiver of any pay phone and when you press the button on said chinger, it would make a digital noise that would "tell" the phone that you just dropped a quarter in it. You could repeat as much as you needed. Being on tour, pre cell phones and still having very expensive long distance charges, that little device saved us all a boatload. And honestly, I never thought once about Ma Bell's kids having to skip a meal. Still don't.