At school we had a bunch of older machines with windows 3.1, which had some touch typing program installed - it was the only thing we were allowed to use

Our first family computer was bought back in 1995. IIRC it was a 166 MHz Pentium / 16 MB ram machine with Windows 95. It cost around $3500-4000 back then, and that's not adjusted for inflation.

EDIT: As a side note, 3 years later I managed to get my hands on a copy of Half-Life, right after it was launched. Our computer, with standalone graphics card, was barely able to run the game. Back in those days, being a gamer and chasing cutting edge graphics was really expensive.

Prior to this we had a electric typewriter, and the main purpose of the machine was to be used for writing documents and other business activities. My first experience with programming, was editing HTML files. I then went to the library to look for books on programming, and the only book I could find there (rural nowhere with population 3000) was a book on Pascal, or possibly Delphi.

I was told that there was this one wiz kid in our small rural town that as supposed to be "really good with computers", he was a couple of years old. I hit him up, and the first thing I noticed in his room was this big "Borland C++" box on his shelf - he showed me a basic 3D flight simulator clone he was working on, as well as some sort of Doom clone. I was in awe.

Suffice to say, he did very well during the dot com boom. Skipped college, and went straight into employment.

A couple of years later, when I started in high-school, some older semi-retired developer had recently moved to town. He worked with our school, and offered a Java programming class. Really excellent teacher, and that was the moment I decided I wanted to work with computers.

I had fun times around 1985 with zx81, ZX spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amiga 500. Creating "games" with sprites and all... Even writing for loops with print statements were fun.

I'll always remember that moment on RPG maker (probably around 9 years old) where suddenly I've understood Variables (I was experienced with HTML and so-on prior), a whole world was unlocked, VB6 programs became possible, everything "clicked" suddenly. I feel once you understand the fundamentals on how it works, it's easy to progress very fast as a child/teenager afterward.

With my kid I want to ensure that fundamentals of computing are understood as early as possible, this is what allows you to understand how the world is interconnected.

I actually had to revisit this sort of thing in a recent design for a CNC --- for want of a good way to determine the location of a smaller circle nested into the region between two larger circles, I made a Circular Array of circles of the desired size, adjusting the number of them until one lined up as desired:

https://community.carbide3d.com/uploads/default/original/3X/...

(If someone knows a good/ideal technique for that, I'd be glad to learn of it --- my math background is kind of shaky)

For me it was the view source era. Around 2001 I was copying HTML from Geocities pages and modifying them in Notepad. I didn't know what a programming language was but I knew how to change the background color and add a marquee. That instant feedback loop -- save, alt-tab, refresh -- was enough to get me hooked.

I never understood why Microsoft didn't have affordable licences to encourage kids to program.

The school computer lab had Visual Basic but you only got an hour week in there as part of the computing subject, the school library computers couldn't have it because the licence was per seat not per site.

You really only had QBASIC which was great but we really wanted to write Windows apps. You'd be up for a thousand dollars for a MSDN academic subscription just to get Visual Basic.

I guess the blessing was instead of Windows apps we made web pages and JavaScript games hosted on our parents ISP webhost accounts while we dreamed of the day we'd have enough money to buy our own .com domain.

Similar experience, but I sucked at Logo, as I was my first day with computer. I aced the 'encrypted' (number->letter substitution) math puzzle (similar to the Emacs one, M-x mpuzzle), tho.

That smell thing is so real. I still get hit with it randomly and I'm immediately 10 years old again

I had many similar experiences, but almost a decade earlier. At grade school we had Apple 2s with Logo, Oregon Trail and other education classics. My junior high was a small parochial school that still had TRS-80s in 1988, along with some apples. My freshman year of high school was in a well funded district in Chicago suburbs. They had Macs with Excel and Word - we wrote lab reports in science classes with our data input and graphed in excel and the graphs pasted into the word doc reports - in 1990.

It's striking how concise the program in the first video is. Also I had no idea "Digger" existed. I've only ever known Dig Dug in that style.

Love this! You've inspired me to write my own blog post about my early days with an Amiga (1000?). I wonder how many of us have similar experiences.

I miss those days. Oregon trail was the first game I played on the computer in 1993 (there was a computer in our Kindergarten class).

Nostalgia for the old web - building websites in HTML on Angelfire and Expage.com. Learning programming on visual basic and how to copy and paste <marquee> to welcome people to the site and to sign the guestbook…

Good old time :)