My first exposure was when I was a toddler, and my dad brought home from work a portable printer terminal and an acoustic modem. Later, we had a big printer ter

My first exposure was when I was a toddler, and my dad brought home from work a portable printer terminal and an acoustic modem. Later, we had a big printer terminal tied to a bright orange 300 baud modem churning through ridiculous amounts of paper; we were never short on scratch paper as kids. Finally, my dad bought our first actual computer that didn't need a modem: the Acorn Electron, the little brother of the BBC Micro, which had a big port in the back where you could expand it: a printer interface that also included two cartridge slots, a disk interface that included a 3.5" disk drive (we would actually move from 3.5" diskettes to 5.25" after the release of the IBM PC), and a rom box that used to expand the rom of our 32 kB ram machine to 224 kB rom. Pascal editors and modem software directly available from rom. But the computer would often hang the moment you turned it on, and it didn't have an on/off button; you had to unplug it to reset it. At some point my dad also brought home a massive luggable PC from work: a big suitcase where the bottom would fold away to become the keyboard, revealing two disk drives with a tiny screen in between. Later, he bought an XT PC, and I think my brother did something that would hook it up to the Electron where one could be a terminal for the other.