My 1st was also a VIC-20 -- which is nothing like the C=64 I eventually upgraded to, Eric! 😉 A BASIC manual and then a 6502 Assembler manual was what I lived on, writing animated musical (erm, "beeping") birthday cards for my family in the former and a disk directory prorgam that fit in the 1541 floppy drive's 2K of RAM in the latter. When I could get a hold of a BYTE magazine, I would spend hours typing in the hex code programs to play the half-way decent game it generated.

After turning "pro" with the COBOL programming thing, I was able to afford an Amiga 500 and I moved from programming my computers to integrating software and hardware on them. I still have one of my A500s and the 1200 that followed. The way they managed libraries and devices dynamically should make any Windows programmer jealous. I need to fire up my WinUAE before going back to my databases now...

Man, that was back when this stuff was fun. I think the Arduino is as close as I've gotten to that same feeling in today's computing.

Rich