Like Eric my parents bought our family a computer when I was little that came with a copy of GW-Basic. They used their tax return for that year because we were basically dirt poor and that was the only way they could manage it. They saw the onrushing future though and decided that their kids should be prepared.
It was a Tandy 1000-HX. At first I just played a lot of Gorillas with my brother. Then eventually I figured out I could change the code in the game and cheat. And that was the start of my lifelong love of code. Just like Eric it was an investment from my parents that paid off in a big way.
Its interesting how now I am investing in my childs future by NOT buying her a computer so that she learns to develop other skills before being sucked in to the vortex.
"I assume that it is going to be at least twice as hard to understand the code in the debugger as it was to write it, so I try to write it using half my available cleverness." - real gem for me, I'd like more people not to rise to their maximum level of cleverness while writing code, so they can easier debug things.
Which I believe is originally a quote from Brian Kernighan:
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing
a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as
you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
The quote attribution I found indicated that it was from "The Elements of Programming Style", 2nd edition, Chapter 2.
It was a Tandy 1000-HX. At first I just played a lot of Gorillas with my brother. Then eventually I figured out I could change the code in the game and cheat. And that was the start of my lifelong love of code. Just like Eric it was an investment from my parents that paid off in a big way.