I fell in love for the first time in 2nd grade, with an Apple ][e. I was born in 1983. I was let out of the classroom into the hallway to use the arithmetic practice software on the computer, but turned on the computer without the floppy disk in it, and got the ] prompt.

I tried typing some things into it, but all I got back was "SYNTAX ERROR". (Wow! Another word with an X in it!) Someone (probably my bio-dad) told me that that was a programming interface. I forget how, but I found out that there were three books on programming in the school library, one each for PASCAL, LOGO and BASIC. Through trial and error, I discovered that the commands in the BASIC book gave me responses other than "SYNTAX ERROR".

I had a lot of fun on that. Eventually, I convinced my mother to buy the family a computer, and she got a Tandy RLX 1000. I think I first played with GW-BASIC on there. It was cool.

Then I found QBASIC, and was frustrated that my program didn't start when I typed RUN, and kept restarting itself after I finally got it to start.

Later played around with VB for DOS, then Win16. Win95-and then jumped to Perl on Linux, because all my friends were using Linux. (No joke; I started with Red Hat 5.2, but switched to Debian potato, because my friends could only answer questions about Debian.)

Fun times. And yes, I was very, very lonely as a kid.