[ChristopherM]

Commodore VIC-20, I was in a "gifted" program in the 2nd grade. Every Wednesday I was taken out of the normal class and put on a bus, where all the other smart kids from different schools were taken to a special school. Our teacher was writing one of those text based adventures. He taught us how to write loops, conditionals, printing output, gathering input, arrays. I have to say I was immediately hooked. Soon after my parents bought a TI-994A, I would spend hours typing in code from those old magazines that had simple game programs in them. I lusted for years for a commodore 64, my friends had them though they had no interest in programming them. It wasn't until 1990 that I got a real computer a Hewlett Packard 286. It wasn't until 1992 that I got a real compiler, borland turbo c++. I had no help, no internet, just one book. And I was on my way...

[WorldWideWayne]

I'm the other VIC-20 vote so far and I don't know where my family had gotten that computer. It came with a book of BASIC programs that you could type in but we didn't have have a storage unit (tape drive), so each time I wanted to play a game I had to type the entire program in and run it. Most of the time I asked my mom to type it in for me, but I remember a couple of times that I spent the hour hunting and pecking in order to play my favorite game (Moon Rover or something, I forget the name).

Fun times!

[stagas]

I used to do that too! On a Spectrum, I had to type in the program, but I didn't even know how to read, so I just matched the symbols on paper with the symbols on the keyboard and tried to get the same output on the TV. Can't remember the games though.