[comatose_kid]

I thought programming was a way to understand how these neat machines worked, so like many other 10 year olds, I tried programming BASIC on an 8 bit (Atari 600XL with the awe-inspiring (not) GTIA chip).

But my first real taste of hacking came in grade 7: understanding and implementing a 1-99 counter using seven segment LED displays, a 555, and some 7447 BCD->7 segment LED driver was lots of fun.

And then in high school, it was all about understanding the Amiga.

Looking over the Amiga schematics in the Hardware Reference Manual and figuring out how the low pass filter circuitry worked was fun.

Writing my first 68k asm program to do sine waves and programming the Amiga's coprocessor chip to do on the fly scanline colour changes was really cool too.

PS - for all you Atari ST lovers, here's 25 cents - buy yourself a real os :)