I started out thinking I could afford the ZX-81 kit. My parents wouldn't let me buy it even with my own savings. Instead they made me wait and got me an Atari 4

I started out thinking I could afford the ZX-81 kit. My parents wouldn't let me buy it even with my own savings. Instead they made me wait and got me an Atari 400, which I'm glad they did. Some of my other friends also had Atari, C64, Apple II, and TI 99/4A (my electrical teacher had one too). Our school had TRS-80s which seemed the most powerful CPU-wise but with not much for graphics/sound. I knew the least about the TI since there didn't seem to be much info available for how to program it at lower levels. The games on C64 and Atari were also better and well-known. Parsec on the TI 99/4A was pretty cool. My software development journey may have started when I got my hands on some memory address maps and graphics/sound details, eventually figuring out machine/assembly language to do things fast enough to make imagined ideas into games that played well. I mostly liked making tools and utilities like font, sprite, or level editors. Also practical things like a disk/file defragger or deleted file recovery (for 90KB/180KB diskettes). Modding retail games was also fun once you got past the mostly rudimentary copy-protection schemes.