My first few PCs weren't even PCs, I didn't know what they were until I was a little bit older. Somehow I intuited them naturally though; I liked exploring and being curious about what I was looking at.
First one I remember was a Commodore 64, along with a 600 page book full of BASIC that you could type out and record on cassette to have your own game. The book was total gibberish to anyone else; it was just pure code with no explanation. But that's what the C64 gave you; an interactive environment on boot where you could program a new game and write it to a cassette. By default. If you wanted to play a game you had to type `RUN` or maybe one or two other things to set it up. But you wouldn't know that, because you just had an interpreter on a basic blue and white screen.
Worst bit was the 10 minutes of spasmodic strobe animations that showed you the game was loading. But also each game controlled those loading animations. You had to know what game you wanted to play, and be sure of it, or otherwise you could just flip to the B-side and get a different game.
After that I think we had a BBC Micro at school but I'm not sure. All I remember is an adventure game and one of those classic 5" floppies. I still really love the look and feel of inserting a floppy and manually locking it in. Floppies and cassettes and VHS's minidiscs were truly fantastic for the time. They were still mechanical, unlike CDs.
Then on my dad's side I and my siblings got an Acorn PC and a bunch of random floppies. None of them made any sense but some of them did cool things when you ran them. I remember hiding from my family and putting in the floppies that made flashing colours and watching it until time passed.
Must have been 11 or 12 years old before we first got a PC and by that point I was utterly fascinated. It was some shitty off-the-shelf eMachines thing but it was the best we could get; I managed to retrofit a decent graphics card in it a little bit later.
First one I remember was a Commodore 64, along with a 600 page book full of BASIC that you could type out and record on cassette to have your own game. The book was total gibberish to anyone else; it was just pure code with no explanation. But that's what the C64 gave you; an interactive environment on boot where you could program a new game and write it to a cassette. By default. If you wanted to play a game you had to type `RUN` or maybe one or two other things to set it up. But you wouldn't know that, because you just had an interpreter on a basic blue and white screen.
Worst bit was the 10 minutes of spasmodic strobe animations that showed you the game was loading. But also each game controlled those loading animations. You had to know what game you wanted to play, and be sure of it, or otherwise you could just flip to the B-side and get a different game.
After that I think we had a BBC Micro at school but I'm not sure. All I remember is an adventure game and one of those classic 5" floppies. I still really love the look and feel of inserting a floppy and manually locking it in. Floppies and cassettes and VHS's minidiscs were truly fantastic for the time. They were still mechanical, unlike CDs.
Then on my dad's side I and my siblings got an Acorn PC and a bunch of random floppies. None of them made any sense but some of them did cool things when you ran them. I remember hiding from my family and putting in the floppies that made flashing colours and watching it until time passed.
Must have been 11 or 12 years old before we first got a PC and by that point I was utterly fascinated. It was some shitty off-the-shelf eMachines thing but it was the best we could get; I managed to retrofit a decent graphics card in it a little bit later.