I don't remember the exact year, but I used to hang out at the local Radio Shack and play with the display model Tandy TRS-80s (and later the Tandy "CoCo" Colo

I don't remember the exact year, but I used to hang out at the local Radio Shack and play with the display model Tandy TRS-80s (and later the Tandy "CoCo" Color Computer). The manager once threatened to toss me out until he saw that I had written (in some early form of BASIC) a nice little demo of the machine's capabilities, after which time he advised his employees to just leave me alone as long as I didn't break anything. (This same tactic of programming a demo of the machine's capabilities would later land me my first computer store job.) Later in life, my first proper exposure to computers came when the fourth grade teacher's assistant noticed I had an interest in science-type stuff and arranged to get me an hour a day on the school's one and only Apple ][+ (kept in the school's main office). He would bring me piles of books about computers and leave me to it, and afterward would ask me questions about what I'd learned. He also introduced me to his Commodore 64, which was a far superior machine to the Apple ][+ at the time. Both were 64K of RAM, and 1Mhz CPU, but the Commodore machines were just graphically (and audibly) superior. Actually ended up running my first business on an Apple ][+ for several years because my mum (who bought me my first computer in my early teens) insisted on Apple because it was the name brand she'd heard a lot and therefore assumed was good, despite my insistence that the Commodore Amiga I wanted was far better value for the money. Still can't complain, as that Apple ][+ ended up paying for itself multiple many times over and eventually bought me my first Amiga, too. Pretty good for a machine with 64K of RAM, 1Mhz CPU, and 300baud acoustic phone modem… :~)