High school in the 80s, I wanted to get the $50 Timex Sinclair self-assembly kit. After a back-and-forth with my parents, finally convinced them to get an Atari 400, though they really hated the membrane keyboard making it seem like a toy than a serious machine.

That was the best thing I ever got. All I had was the BASIC cartridge, Asteroids cartridge, and the intro to basic that came with it. I had no storage--that was the compromise for the step upgrade. It was a great lesson to spend literal days writing, refining, and perfecting a program. Only to eventually get bored "I wanna play Asteroids, poof." Eventually I hung around the right places, met folks, read magazines, learned machine-then-assembly language. Everything since then has been pretty easy building on all the low-level stuff. C, oh like assembly but more convenient. It was also fun to disassemble the games I got to see how they worked. Some of the worst games had the best copy protection--they must have thought highly of their creation.

Every computer since then has pretty much been a 'business machine', not nearly as much fun. Even the Atari ST with its M68k seemed very work-like. Lucky for me, I liked worky things too, learning the early Windows, OS/2, NT SDKs etc. The NeXTSTEP OS and Interface Builder blew my mind.