I spend the afternoon unattended making pictures with PETSCII and poking around the user interface, which I remember as being difficult, and the very first time I encountered BASIC.

Been programming ever since. Literally still got almost every machine I ever hacked on in between now and then, also. ;)

My first home "PC" was a VIC-20 with a giant box of unlabeled cassette tapes that the previous owner had painstakingly typed in (or possibly swapped/traded) from various 80's magazines like BYTE. It was wonderful - my favourite find from that box was Amok!.

In 9th grade, the math class I was in was Pre-Algebra. I had nearly flunked 8th grade math, and so that teacher recommended I be held back for 9th grade, where normally everyone went into Algebra-I. My teacher for 9th grade was Mrs. King, and I got straight As for the first time in my life. To this day, I credit her with turning me around and helping to give me the incredible career that I’ve had. But that also meant I couldn’t get into the computer lab, since you had to be enrolled in Algebra-I in order to get in. That was also the year that my middle school got a computer lab, for 6th-8th grade. So, I missed getting into the computer lab in two different ways that year,

In 10th grade, I was in Algebra-I. But they changed the rules on me, and then you had to have already had Algebra-I, in order to get in. So, again, I missed the computer lab.

That summer (1982), I convinced my parents to buy me a Commodore Vic-20, with a whole 5KB of RAM available. It was the least expensive but reasonably functional machine we could get. I typed in a bunch of BASIC programs from various magazines, but the first program that I wrote for myself was a complete implementation of a choose-your-own-adventure book. I did every word, every paragraph, every choice, every ending. The whole shebang. After a while, I ran out of RAM. So, I had to buy an 8KB RAM expansion card, and a cassette tape drive. And then I ran out of RAM again. Then I had to buy a 16KB RAM card. I made all the variables and line numbers as short and small as I could, because there wasn’t a 24KB expansion card that could be bought. I ended up with just five whole bytes of RAM left over by the time I finished writing the game.

For 11th grade, the high school computer teachers said that I could come into the computer lab on my own free time (before and after school, during lunch, etc…) because the processor on the Vic-20 was similar to that used on the Apple ][+ computers they had in the lab. I couldn’t take any computer classes, because they were all filled by seniors. Before the first semester was done, I was helping to teach the seniors how to write their programs.

For 12th grade, the teachers let me directly enter into the advanced programming class (Pascal), because they knew that I had basically helped teach the intro class the previous year. We were split up into two-person teams for our final class project. The team I was on finished early, and so I was put into a team with another guy who had been working alone. We were the only two teams to finish our projects that year. For graduation, I wrote to my various family members to ask them to help me buy an Apple ][+ that my Scoutmaster was selling, so that he could afford to buy an Apple //e that he needed for his professional software development work.

Then there was college.

I wonder of even a single byte I have written, will be still used decades from now.

Jimmy Maher has some excellent articles on the history of early computers (with focus on videogames) in his blog.

https://www.filfre.net/2011/06/the-trash-80-part-1/

Also, the "P" in PET stands for Personal, probably as differentiation to mean a computer that you don't have to share. It's a response to the larger time-shared computers back in the day. The "personal computers" had keyboards and screens that looked very much like mainframe terminals.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49953027