Old man story time. This was the first computer we had in our home, I believe in the summer of 1978 or 1979. Mom was working on her Masters in education (high school mathematics) and also taking Fortran courses on Hofstra’s PDP-11. She took me (~6 years old) to the machine room once, and one of the bearded sysadmins printed me a giant ASCII art of Snoopy on his doghouse on white and green fanfold paper with a dot matrix printer.

Her high school took delivery of its first ever computer, a PET with a chiclet keyboard. She was assigned to take it home over the summer to learn, and figure out how to use in the curriculum.

A few memories- it was the first piece of electronic equipment in the house with a grounded plug, and the house had no grounded outlets. Most people would have used a cheezy adapter, but Dad sledgehammered an 8’ copper rod in the backyard and installed a single grounded outlet for it.

The cassette loading could be very fiddly and slow. A favorite game was “Hangman”, played that for hours. Observe the beautiful graphics.

https://youtu.be/jnj2ZgOYYDQ?is=zZauKOy5f95wDqrg

The PET went back to the school in the fall, and I started begging for a PC of my own. For the longest time I was constantly asking for a Timex/Sinclair. Christmas 1983, a TI-99/4a appeared under the tree, thanks to them being sold far below cost after failing in the market. That lead to an Apple //e in 1987, and a Dell 486 DX2-66 in 1993.

Same year, 78'ish, my Dad takes me to his associates new office, where his assistant has just unpacked the brand new Commodore Pet. "We have no idea what to do with it, we just know we need it", says the associate.

I spend the afternoon unattended making pictures with PETSCII and poking around the user interface, which I remember as being difficult, and the very first time I encountered BASIC.

Been programming ever since. Literally still got almost every machine I ever hacked on in between now and then, also. ;)

I had a different home computer, with a cassette player hooked up to it, and I remember well having to fiddle with volume and tone controls to get things to load. I'd always been envious of Commodores and the like, which came with what I assumed was a specially built and calibrated tape drive, so surprised when you said it was quite fiddly to load as well. What kind of adjustments could you make to get stuff to load properly?

I had the same TI. And it started my career. And I have one in my garage I’m not sure works but I cannot get rid of it! Too sentimental!

For me, I had played on early ATARI game consoles, and I knew from a very early age that I wanted to play on even more powerful computers.

In 9th grade, the math class I was in was Pre-Algebra. I had nearly flunked 8th grade math, and so that teacher recommended I be held back for 9th grade, where normally everyone went into Algebra-I. My teacher for 9th grade was Mrs. King, and I got straight As for the first time in my life. To this day, I credit her with turning me around and helping to give me the incredible career that I’ve had. But that also meant I couldn’t get into the computer lab, since you had to be enrolled in Algebra-I in order to get in. That was also the year that my middle school got a computer lab, for 6th-8th grade. So, I missed getting into the computer lab in two different ways that year,

In 10th grade, I was in Algebra-I. But they changed the rules on me, and then you had to have already had Algebra-I, in order to get in. So, again, I missed the computer lab.

That summer (1982), I convinced my parents to buy me a Commodore Vic-20, with a whole 5KB of RAM available. It was the least expensive but reasonably functional machine we could get. I typed in a bunch of BASIC programs from various magazines, but the first program that I wrote for myself was a complete implementation of a choose-your-own-adventure book. I did every word, every paragraph, every choice, every ending. The whole shebang. After a while, I ran out of RAM. So, I had to buy an 8KB RAM expansion card, and a cassette tape drive. And then I ran out of RAM again. Then I had to buy a 16KB RAM card. I made all the variables and line numbers as short and small as I could, because there wasn’t a 24KB expansion card that could be bought. I ended up with just five whole bytes of RAM left over by the time I finished writing the game.

For 11th grade, the high school computer teachers said that I could come into the computer lab on my own free time (before and after school, during lunch, etc…) because the processor on the Vic-20 was similar to that used on the Apple ][+ computers they had in the lab. I couldn’t take any computer classes, because they were all filled by seniors. Before the first semester was done, I was helping to teach the seniors how to write their programs.

For 12th grade, the teachers let me directly enter into the advanced programming class (Pascal), because they knew that I had basically helped teach the intro class the previous year. We were split up into two-person teams for our final class project. The team I was on finished early, and so I was put into a team with another guy who had been working alone. We were the only two teams to finish our projects that year. For graduation, I wrote to my various family members to ask them to help me buy an Apple ][+ that my Scoutmaster was selling, so that he could afford to buy an Apple //e that he needed for his professional software development work.

Then there was college.