[atsaloli]

When I was 12, I was in Vienna for a month. My family and two other families of Soviet immigrants were sharing a flat, waiting for our paperwork to clear so we could move on to our final destination.

My family had been trying to get out of Russia for 10 years, so I'd been taking English lessons since I was three.

The head of one of the other families was a programmer from Vilnius.

I taught him English and he taught me how to program in BASIC with pencil and paper. We did it at the kitchen table as I recall.

I saw a computer in a store window but we couldn't afford to buy it.

Next month we were in Ladispoli, Italy, and I had access to a Commodore plus 4. That's when I got a chance to try out my programs and learned about debugging.