I got started in computer programming when I was around 11 years old.  Back 1981 I spent Easter over at my Aunt and Uncle’s place up in Sheffield, England.  Should have been lots of fun messing around outside enjoying fine spring days.  But the weather was appalling, it actually snowed and apart from a trip to the movies to see Superman II, we were pretty much stuck inside.  My Aunt was a teacher, and for the Easter break she’d been entrusted with the school’s computer.  I’m pretty sure it was a kit box, as I don’t remember any specific branding.  It came with a stack of cassette tapes with a bunch of demos and educational games.

After messing around for an afternoon, I was quickly bored - why were these games a bit crappy?  How come I couldn’t make thousands of little characters appear on screen instead of no more than twenty or so?  So I cracked open the manual and tried to figure out how it worked.  What was all this about programming?  And editing lines of code?  How did I run things and save them?  Why did it sometimes spout gibberish messages?  After a few days of messing around, I had it doing my bidding.  Thousands of little men drew up on the screen, and we had fun entering in our names and watching it fly up the screen.  For an 11 year old who’d never even touched a computer before, it was amazing stuff!

So having stayed an extra week in Sheffield to learn the ins-and-outs of programming, I returned home with the bug.  Later that year that things really started to take off in the home computer market. It seemed all of a sudden that computers were everywhere, and calling me.  There was no way I could ignore it.