My parents had bought me a Commodore 16 for Christmas, maybe 85 or 86. I remember us hooking it up to the old Rank Arena telly that we had in our back room and then not knowing what to do. I remember we put a tape in and pressed PLAY but didn't type anything.
Only ended up having that machine for a few weeks from memory. We couldn't find any software for it and couldn't really figure it out, so my parents packed it up and took it back to the store where they exchanged it for a C64.
I'll never forget the next few days. The computer was set up in the living room and it was amazing to everyone. We played Space Invaders and Frogger and Arcadia and African Safari.... My mum and dad got into it, my uncles and aunts got into it.
I'll never forget falling asleep snug in my bed, listening to the rest of the family out in the living room laughing and having such an awesome time.
Then I found BASIC and "WOW I CAN MAKE THE COMPUTER DO WHAT I WANT!". The rest is history :)
Nothing really quite matched that feeling, until the 'Christmas of the Wii'. Sitting at my aunt's place, again with lots of the family around, watching my normally grumpy grandfather get into Wii Sports.
Oh man, this made my day. I'm so lucky to have the life that I do :)
I wanted a Commodore 64, of course, so when I got that grey instead of beige box it was immediately clear to me that it was not "the real thing". In retrospect, though, I am immensely grateful for my dad's choice. There being almost no software for the C16, and in particular the complete lack of games, meant that the only thing I could really do with it was to start programming with the built-in BASIC. So, I learnt that... and it did not take long until my dad stopped being the person I could ask about how to do things on a computer...
First experiencing a computer as something you program instead of something you use to run programs written by other people was one of the coolest things that could have happened to me at that time.
Later, I got a Commodore 128. I did some interesting stuff on it, for example, it is the only machine I ever really programmed in assembler. But to be honest, most its uptime was spent in the C64 mode running games.
Python straight for the bootloader.