I was born in Australia in 1970, and learned programming as a natural progression from the electronics kits and soldering-iron based things I was doing with my

I was born in Australia in 1970, and learned programming as a natural progression from the electronics kits and soldering-iron based things I was doing with my favourite uncle, who was a Ham-radio enthusiast and had everything we needed in his radio shack to build ourselves a little digital computer, in 1978. I was 8 years old, and therefore perfectly timed to grow up with computing. By 1983, I had written my first commercial software (to control a laser light-show for one of my Dad's night-clubs) and moved on to 'real computers' - in my case, an Oric-1 and then an Amstrad CPC6128 which I wired up to a modem, and with which I promptly discovered Unix and C programming on a local university system, courtesy of a friends' login being provided to me for the purpose of testing my modem ... In the 90's, things took a turn for the worse in my opinion, when everything became Microsoft-oriented, and the field was renamed to "IT" instead of Computer Science. I watched with dismay as a lot of my colleagues and associates, still in school (where I'd dropped out of high school), learned "Visual Basic" and other such nonsense. It really seems like there was a period in the 90's where computer education went backwards. But nowadays, people are realising that all these old machines still work, and are still quite relevant when it comes to teaching kids how computers work. A day with a raspberry Pi is one thing - but a week with an 8-bit machine is another thing entirely, and between these two worlds, big connections can be made by the budding student of computer science.