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by stevekemp 2928 days ago
My parents moved house when I was around 11. I suspect as a result of the recent house-purchase my parents basically bought one christmas present for my two sisters and myself: A 48k ZX Spectrum home computer.

The computer came with ~10 casette-tapes, a casette-player for loading them, and the computer itself. Unfortunately the casette-player we received in our bundle was broken. Which meant that we couldn't load any games.

So I read the manual instead, and experimented with programming in BASIC. A week later, or so, (all the shops being closed around Christmas time in the UK back then), we had a working system. My sisters played games, and while I did too I was hooked on programming.

A few more details here:

https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html