31 years ago, almost to the day (it was the last day of school), my father brought home an Apple IIe with two disk drives, a monochrome monitor, and 128 kilobyt

31 years ago, almost to the day (it was the last day of school), my father brought home an Apple IIe with two disk drives, a monochrome monitor, and 128 kilobytes of RAM. It came with two floppy disks, "System Master" and "Sample Programs", and several spiral-bound books: Applesoft Tutorial, the DOS Manual, Reference Manual. I was eleven years old. I plugged the computer in, put a disk in the drive, turned it on. It beeped, whirred for a while, and a flashing cursor appeared. "Now what?" I wondered. I typed a few words and pushed Return. "?SYNTAX ERROR", it said. I cracked open the "Applesoft Tutorial", which was in English -- not my mother tongue -- , and proceeded to type in the first program I saw. And then: ]RUN HELLO. WHAT'S YOUR NAME? APRICOT NICE TO MEET YOU, APRICOT. YOUR NAME REVERSED IS TOCIRPA. ] I was hooked. I spend the following weeks teaching myself enough English to be able to understand the manual, and learned BASIC by typing stuff it and seeing what it did. Then my parents gave me a subscription to Nibble, a magazine that had an interesting mix of technical articles, product reviews, and many programs to type in. I learned a lot from reading those programs. When summer ended and I went to junior high, I met with older kids who had a better command of programming and eventually graduated to 6502 assembly language, and even did a bit of hardware hacking, thanks to a wonderful book called "The Apple II Circuit Description".