Our math teacher in UK high school c.1976 asked us if anyone want to join him for an adult education programming class being taught by the local university (Durham), and a bunch of us did. This was batch mode (punched card) PL/1 programming - submit job to operator and an hour later get a fanfold printout of the result. A couple of us (incl. me) had parents that worked at the University, and got the computer dept. to agree to allow us high school kids to go in on weekends etc to use the Unix system (online access) there, after the initial adult education class had ended. We spent a lot of time there, taught ourselves to program in C, and caused some amount of trouble by messing with the unix system - brute force password cracking, and on one occasion accidentally deleting the /etc/passwd file, which luckily they had backed up - they were surprisingly tolerant of all this and didn't kick us out!

In March 1978 the first issue of "Personal Computer World" magazine came out, featuring the just released NASCOM-1 kit computer on the front cover. I'd just inherited 200 UKP from my grandmother, so sent it off and got myself a kit. This was a 1 MHz Z-80 system that came with 2 KB of memory (1KB for user, 1KB for system), and a built-in monitor program that let you enter programs as hex machine code. The computer itself came as bare board, bag of components to solder, and no case. It used a TV for display and cassette recorder for program/data storage. You'd hand assemble your program on paper, then enter the codes and run it. There wasn't a whole lot you could do in 1KB, but I remember coding things like a hangman game, and memorizing the op-codes well enough to program short things directly in hex.

I then went to college, taking Math & Comp Sci, graduating in 1982, and lucking into a dream job at Acorn Computers, which started my career as developer.