[Chronos74]

My entire life has revolved around tech as a result of a Tandy 1000 SX in the mid 1980's. I'm not exactly sure how old I was, but it was single digits when my dad brought it home. He worked for a small, local retail chain and maintained their early computer-based point-of-sale systems, along with a mainframe for their office. I learned how to create batch files to set IRQ interrupts for the sound and graphics cards to play games before I learned to write in cursive. I went to a "computer camp" and learned how to write games in BASIC at 8 or 9, had my first online experiences using TandyNet, and went on to create my first website in the mid-90's using HTML 0.9. It was a crazy time, but it led me to my current IT career of about 30 years.

[jadbox]

I had the same Tandy 1000 SX and also a Commodore 64. My parents did not approve of video game, so outside of pacman, these were equipment to learn programming when I was in my single digits. My major complaint of today's computers is that they are getting harder to harder to 'learn' coding. When you used the Commodore for example, the interface was the programming language. In a way, you HAD to learn a little bit of programming to even use it. iOS devices for a long time made local development an impossibility, although the situation has improved a bit since the early days (still no JIT allowed, but I digress).

[Chronos74]

Yes, you really had to understand how a computer worked in order to do the most basic things that are now just taken for granted. How many people now even know what an IRQ interrupt is? Never mind writing a script to set the system parameters required just to launch a program.