It all happened pretty fast - a TRS80 in the classroom, I think, and a Sinclair at the neighbor's house on which I played some kind of flight simulator. I got permission to go to a special summer school and take a computer course. That meant programming BASIC on a Commodore Pet. A year or two later I mowed enough lawns to buy myself a C=64 and in the meantime, the school got some Apple IIs (and some clones: anyone remember the Franklin? A 100% knock-off, and byte-compatible, I think).

The C64 was the beginning of an obsession that's lasted to this day. Still remember the big day I went from the datasette cassette tape to the 1541 disk drive. Life was about as good as it was going to get.