The local kid who knew about computers told me that Commodore 64 games were mostly written in machine language. So at the age of 12 or so I went to the library

The local kid who knew about computers told me that Commodore 64 games were mostly written in machine language. So at the age of 12 or so I went to the library and flipped through the Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide chapter on machine language - what the C64's memory map was, what registers the 6510 processor had, and then a series of steps in assembly language to display an A on the screen. This was fairly over my head, and my mentor, who was getting busy with high school by this time, didn't have much luck explaining it to me. I worked in IT for a while and picked up some programming but didn't do much at work for a long time. Then I started going to college at nights and on weekends and now I am a programmer.