"For me the important spark was that my mother was forward-thinking enough to see the C64 as a useful educational purchase" Same here, but mom and dad got me a

"For me the important spark was that my mother was forward-thinking enough to see the C64 as a useful educational purchase" Same here, but mom and dad got me a BBC Micro. Stayed with Acorn and got an Acorn A310 when I was 18. Wrote a game in ARM assembly and self-published it in 1992. Now my day-job is Java, tying this story nicely with this other front-pager today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5551771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5551771 My school actively put me off a computer science education. I was programming colorful games in BBC Basic and 6502 assembly language using keyboard and floppy discs, while my O-Level text book was describing punch cards and tapes. I went off and got a degree in Physics instead. So while we may be only two data points, we both share the experience of having access to a computer at a young age and being way ahead of the teachers by the time it was taught in school. I'm trying to figure out how to make her laptop as easily programmable for my youngest daughter as my BBC was for me. Hell, if I wanted to play a game on the BBC I had to type a command, so right there the reward required the first step of programming.