I fondly remember dad spending his tax refund to buy me a brand new Dell the next year, and coming home from work to find me at the kitchen table with it in parts. He said nothing at first, but from the look in his eyes, it took him about 30-40 seconds to remember that I knew what I was doing already.

However, with none of that I think I'd have done the same thing.

I spent all that time learning C64 basic and some assembly. I used to type in games that I found in C64 magazines at the library. I had no way to save it, so sometimes it would take me multiple days.

A few times, the power was cut :-( and I had to start over.

I got caught, funny enough when returning a disc rather than stealing it.

This turned into my first job as the guy agreed to not make a big deal out of is if I used my Ape50 to do deliveries for him after school for a bit. After the bit ended, we decided we got along, so I kept working there afternoons until I graduated, and two years fulltime after graduation.

Then the place closed because a Euronics opened two streets over, and I moved to the US for university.

He rescued an old Compaq 486 for me out of a dumpster at work when I was seven. I got to "help" install Windows 3.1 off a SyQuest drive, and in the ensuing years helped install/configure staples like a Sound Blaster, a CD drive, a Super VGA card, and the like. I broke this machine _a lot_. Eventually, I started learning to fix it myself.

In 2001 he built a PC from scratch. This PC ran Mandrake 8.1, which was a completely new paradigm to both of us. Although he abandoned it, I was hooked - I'd go spend time in the basement just to tinker with it, even though I had my own perfectly capable PC upstairs. Eventually I got a discarded Pentium machine and installed a slightly newer Mandrake on it.

By 2008, I had several such discarded machines. I think at this point I was running Debian on them, Mandrake having become Mandriva (and generally awful).

In college, I was "that guy" who ran Linux in a VM, and could do all of the lab work remotely from my dorm with X forwarding off the big, beefy Solaris boxes. I even bought a tablet PC off eBay, installed Linux on it (I think it was Ubuntu), and got permission from many professors to sub out a TI-83 for MATLAB, again running via forwarding.

I got a job out of college doing at-scale release and infrastructure management, starting with just a bunch of shell scripts, eventually graduating to tools like Chef and Ansible, later Docker and later still orchestrators like Kubernetes. At my second job I learned way more than I wanted to about how the Linux kernel worked, due to a kernel bug that sometimes robbed us of about 400MB of memory.

I decided to switch to Linux (Fedora) full-time in 2015, and haven't looked back.

In short: - I was incredibly lucky to have a dad who cared about tech. - I was also incredibly lucky to grow up when discarded tech was still a useful learning tool. (Can a five-year-old tablet even speak modern TLS these days?) - I loved finding new ways to use and learn about Linux, and I grasped at many chances.

My parents weren't well off (Dad was a docker, mum worked part-time as a travel agent), living in the pretty run-down area of Northern city (the cheap end of L4 in Liverpool, UK, if anyone cares). The idea of getting my own computer was something I hadn't ever really considered.

So, the day arrives, and I get the TV (Wow!) and a printed circuit board with a bunch of components, otherwise known as the ZX81 in kit form. I spend a good month or two watching TV, as kids are wont to do, and eventually parental pressure to "get that fucking thing working, lad" mounts to the level where it can't be ignored any more.

Go down to the shed in the back yard (for Americans, a UK 'back yard' doesn't mean a garden at the back of the house, in our case it was a small, cemented over 'private alley' to the real alley (where the bins were) at the back of the row of houses. My dad had somehow crammed a shed in there) - and started to solder.

Took the weekend, as I recall, because I wasn't great at soldering at 11, but eventually it seemed to plug in and turn on - got the BASIC prompt and everything. Read through the manual, and there was a demo line to type in and show things were working. I worked through the example, got sufficiently confident, and the entire family convened in the lounge (where the only other TV was) to watch this modern wonder...

I typed in:

    PRINT 2 + 2 = 4

    1

I've never done CS (I'm an aging physicist if anything from 30 years ago matters in that regard) but I was hooked, initially on games, but also on what you can actually do with these things. These days I live far away from that 2-up/2-down Liverpool terraced house, in sunny California. Been working for Apple for nigh on 20 years, and coding for the last 40 or so. I don't think any single thing has changed my life more than that ZX81 kit. It wasn't even my favourite 8-bit computer (that would be the Atari XL I bought when Dixons were selling them off for £99 with a disk-drive) but it was certainly the one with the most impact.

We were incredibly poor, so my mother nearly killed him, but he insisted that personal computers were here to stay, and that his children needed to become acquainted.

Nearly 40 years later, he was right. I have made, and continue to make, a great living on these crazy machines.

The staff liked me and asked me to work a couple of extra days on the weekend for a big computer expo (maybe PCIT) so I became a fifteen year old salesperson, selling games and powerpoint 97 (rest of office wasn’t out yet). Rather than being paid in cash, we negotiated something better: a CD ROM! I think it was 8x.

The sad part of the story is that after they gave me the CD ROM for working the weekend my Mum got a call from someone saying I stole it. Maybe someone didn’t have permission to give me it? I didn’t have to give it back in the end - i guess the manager spoke to the right person - but the false accusation still really hurts. It would have been a really happy story otherwise.

In the 1970s he was a computer mechanic, with a spanner and oil and all that kind of stuff. There were only two of those computers in the country, one at Raleigh Cycles and one at Cabdury Chocolate. They used them to do the wages. They had an agreement that if one broke he or his opposite number could jump in a car and drive to the other with a box of cards to run the batch and then fix it later.

He used to take me to work on a Monday night and it's where I got interested in computers. He stopped working in 1978. I wish I had been old enough to understand it more. I was 6-8 at the time.

My somewhat similar one: In the early ‘50s my mother took the one and only computer class her university offered. At one point a guy from the local defense contractor comes in (!) and essentially offers everyone in the class with a half-decent grade a job at the end of the year. She took them up on it and that’s how she got into computers. She also claims she used to manually bootstrap a computer using toggle switches to initiate a loader and then feed it punch cards (when not in use, kept in a card-catalog cabinet like libraries used to have). I guess I shouldn’t doubt it too much. She did used to bring old (some used!) punch cards home from work for us kids to play with. I suppose they must have been clearing out obsolete equipment and systems.