I was programming in Z-80 assembler in that timeframe, and was pretty excited by the idea of C. I had previously thought to myself that it would be possible to create a language that simplified the tedious, repetitive tasks in assembler but that didn't add bloat or take away byte-level control like BASIC did.

I was an avid reader of Byte and 80-Micro back then.

For various reasons, I focused on other studies for a few years after that, and didn't immediately learn C until after I went to college. I'm sure if I had learned C in '83, I would have had an entirely different career trajectory.