My neighbor got a Comodore PET around Christmas of 1979. I was 11, and I knew the minute I saw it that I wanted to know everything about it. When my neighbor wa

My neighbor got a Comodore PET around Christmas of 1979. I was 11, and I knew the minute I saw it that I wanted to know everything about it. When my neighbor wasn't home, I would sneak into their house via a basement window, and teach myself BASIC by typing in programs from various magazines. A few years later, I convinced my parents to buy me a Comodore 64 for about $600. This was a ton of money back in the day, it was more than our family's color TV cost. When I got to college, I wanted to be a Electrical Engineer, just like my neighbor, but I didn't do well my first semester. I switched to computer science because it was easier. 3 years later I was porting VAX Fortran to a Cray YMP and couldn't believe that people were paying me to do it. I would have happily done it for nothing, just for the chance to run code on a Cray.