Bill Wehnert - The Tom Swift books (I had a set, too) weren't written by Asimov. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift

I've been a gadget-geek all my life, since I was a little kid, dismantling mom's vacuum cleaner to see what made all the noise (and then getting in trouble for not putting it back together - once I learned what was inside, I was no longer interested). My first experience with computing hardware was mechanical Marchant calculators, in the university physics labs where my father taught. Then came an electronic calculator with a CRT display a couple of inches square, about the size of a large typewriter and weighing considerably more. It could add, subtract, multiply, divide and remember one number. No square root. The first experience with real programming was a beginning Fortran course, at the university again, after a Vietnam-era tour in the Marine Corps. Univac 9300, 32KB of magnetic core memory, punched 80-column card input - the university's sole computer. Everything in the school ran on it, and students were given one run per day, in the evening, to hand in their deck of cards. Next morning, you could pick up your card deck and however many sheets of paper your job had generated, and go troubleshoot it. That evening, you could try again. If there was too much stuff for the operator to fit it all in, you had to wait until the next day. Sometimes, if the operator was feeling generous and the workload was light, you could persuade him to run a few things during lunch hour.

Even under such primitive conditions, once I discovered what those machines could do, I was hooked and have been at it ever since.