My first computing and programming was on a CP/M machine. It was the 90s, Windows 95 was just coming out and I was just 12, but my family was too poor to affor

My first computing and programming was on a CP/M machine. It was the 90s, Windows 95 was just coming out and I was just 12, but my family was too poor to afford a contemporary computer. The mother of one of my classmates gave me an old Epson QX-10. Even figuring out how to boot the computer was a learning experience. Among the disks I also found dBASE II, and a book on programming it. I also had a lot of fun duplicating disks and sending files with PIP. Many of the commands and concepts of CP/M were similar to but more orthogonal than MSDOS.