I had the exact same experience, only 25 or so years later. I learned how to program in Basic on a Casio25 calculator, and later on a TI82 (the Casio couldn't

I had the exact same experience, only 25 or so years later. I learned how to program in Basic on a Casio25 calculator, and later on a TI82 (the Casio couldn't do key polling, and my parents wouldn't buy me a new calculator just for programming. So I broke it on purpose to get a new one. Sorry mom! I later got a TI-83, while all my friends had overpowered TI89-92; the underpowered nature of the TI-83 felt more romantic and elegant to me.) 2 friends and I got really into programming, making tons of games in BASIC. I made a grid based SimCity clone, a turn by turn clone of [1], a very slow dungeon crawler inspired by Diablo (my parents were fairly antivideogames, so my way of experiencing the games I wanted to play was to program clones of them), a flexible "engine" for text adventures (I was really into pen and paper RPGs but none of my friends were into it), etc. Then one day we discovered assembly, and our mind was blown. We would sneakily use the library computers to print z80 reference sheets; it was awesome. Middle & high school were awful times all around for me, but this definitely made it better. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Battlegrounds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Battlegroun...