When I was 12 someone gave me a very old Z-80 machine. The only disk I had for it with a programming language on it was dBASE II which supported scripts, but t

When I was 12 someone gave me a very old Z-80 machine. The only disk I had for it with a programming language on it was dBASE II which supported scripts, but the computer also came with a very thin, informally written dBASE II programming introduction. Although for a proprietary database script language, the author of the book (alas, I cannot remember the author's name) did a remarkable job of introducing basic structured programming concepts like loops and select statements. I did not so much learn from the book as experience a cascade of Earth shaking revelations from it; it was as if each concept were something already wired into my brain, and the words from the book activated mental subroutines that were waiting to be awakened. (This makes more sense if I point out that I had spent every waking moment since about age 6 up to age 12 obsessively trying to work out in my head how computers and programming worked without actually having access to a machine (my family was too poor to afford a computer in the 80's) and so reading the book was a process of discovering vindication of things I'd only been able to speculate about.)