First language here, as well. AMOS BASIC on an Amiga 500 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOS_(programming_language). Despite the naysayers who'd claim I permanently broke my programming ability, the excitement of getting things working right away - of writing actual games with pretty damn good graphical effects despite knowing virtually nothing - was a huge catalyst in getting me over the early humps in learning to program. I doubt writing my 50th Fibonacci generator (this time, use tail-recursion!) would've kept my interest long enough to see the beauty in real engineering.

48K eh? Ahh rich kids... :)

What blew my mind shortly after getting my hands on a ZX Spectrum was to find out that most computers of the time (Dragon, Oric, Apple, Commodore, etc) had significantly different versions of BASIC.

The next thing that blew my mind was to learn that editing computer programs could be done full screen instead of line by line and that, in fact, most programming environments did not use line numbers except as visual aids.

Radio Shack Color Computer on 16k back in 1981. My parents let me have the manuals well before the Christmas gift of the computer itself. So my first programming was at age 13, handwritten in notebooks during my middle school classes.

Me and my dad soldered RAM piggyback to make the computer 64k.

And I almost immediately moved to hand-assembling 6809 code via BASIC pokes. Wrote a whole music synthesizer that way. I still miss those days.

As for many of us I'm sure.

For me, it was GW-BASIC on an XT clone around 1986 as well.

Same here, and that's why I still use "n" as for loop variable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ZX_Spectrum%2B.jpg

CASIO Basic for me.

Solving physics problems while my colleagues were still writing the problem.

Me: Oric-1 (also 48K) with a better BASIC than the ZX Spectrum!

I still have this machine, and its still being used (by my kids).

Xerox 8086 with QBasic for me. 640k RAM!

QBasic on a 386/25MHz!