The beginning for me is kind of vague as I write this; I do not recall the year exactly, but I remember clearly particular events. It was early 80's, between 1982 and 1983, so I was between 10 and 12 years old.
Up to this point I'd been aware of things like the Atari 5200 console and the Commodore 64, my friend down the street had one or both of those, not sure which, as I remember the distinctive Commodore 64 keyboard, but also playing Centipede quite often (but maybe Centipede came later).
But being aware of and even using these things at someone else's house is one thing... having it in your own home is another.
My older sister had a friend by the name of Dave, and one day he brought over this box that looked like a TV with a keyboard attached. With myself, my sister and my mom gathered around, he plugged it in and turned it on.
He was rather excited about it, talking about programming, and the future of computers, and so on. I studied the way he operated it as he showed us a few things, like how to navigate through the file system (this was MS-DOS... on a monochrome monitor).
Really though, on the scale of technological wonders, it was a little ... boring. I mean we had just gotten color TV - gimme a break!
For some reason Dave left the box at our house for a while, and at some point I was home alone, and I got curious. So I did like Dave had done to turn the box on, watched it initialize, and then started poking around in the file system, opening things I had learned were executable or command files, and so on (its a wonder I didn't reformat the whole drive!).
I don't remember what all I found or did, though I distinctly remember coming across a pornographic animated ASCII file that would abruptly stop working half-way through, and I remember spending considerable time trying to figure out how to fix it - and that's when the love affair with computers started, much to my shame.
