[phenylene]

I learned to program in 1982 when my mom bought me a Timex Sinclair 1000 (2K RAM!) and had to type in all the games from source listings in books and magazines. At some point later, I bought a 16K memory expansion pack which was awesome until you jiggled the computer a little bit and it would reset all memory.

The very first bug I had to figure out was when I was typing in an expression like "A <> B", and not realizing that "<>" was a single character on the keyboard, and not "<" followed by ">".