My First Computer(s)
I stumbled across this series about old computers from the 1970s and I found the first 2 computers we had growing up in my house in San Jose, CA. Having an electrical engineer for a father made it more likely I’d have access to cool gear like this at such an early period in Silicon Valley’s early days.
My first computer was a variant of the IMSAI 8080. At the time my dad and his other hobbyist 
friends assembled these computers together. The Altair was an earlier favorite and the IMSAI was an evolutionary follow-on. I think the one my dad had was a little better because it had the Zilog Z80 chip in it (oooh!). It had 64K 8″ floppy disks and ran CP/M. Before we had an OS on it I would have to enter in a 20 or so byte sequence on the front panel, setting each of the 16 bits of each byte, then pressing the Enter switch to enter the byte into memory. When I was ready to run the program I would push the Run switch and it would allow me to type on the keyboard and see what I was typing in the display. This was my first program! When we got CP/M I enjoyed playing some sort of ASCII Star Trek game and another adventure game where you would type commands like “open door” and it would respond with “The door is open but you can’t go in, a troll blocks its path”. You could call this an all-text precursor to Warcraft.
Then later on my dad got the Interact Model One, at that time sold by Micro Video in Ann Arbor, 
MI. This was cool because it had some games and joysticks! All storage was on a standard tape deck. Eventually I got tired of the games and wanted to buy more but they were very expensive ($40!) so I picked up a book that taught how to program BASIC on it and I figured out how to write my own games. Those were the funnest games because they were made by me and I think I was about 10 or 11 years old while making my own games. I remember spending hours into the night trying to figure out how to make images move across the screen, how to react to joystick input and collision detection.
We’ve certainly come a long way since then, but I know my love for technology started at a very young age thanks to exposure from my dad, who gave me the tools to discover how much I enjoyed writing software that is useful and fun for me and others to use.
