>>Interesting. Ironically, it was chess that got me into computing. I went over to a friend's house one evening to play a couple of games. He had a TRS-80 that he had written a BASIC program for. As he explained to me how it did what it did, he kept saying, "Now you understand what's going on, don't you?" My head kept nodding yes, but in my mind, I was clueless.
>
>My first PC was a Tandy 1000 for $1,200 in 1984 (I think). I had taken a course in BASIC previously and I sat down and wrote a drafting program that would put different shapes and lines on the screen based on the x, y coordinates. I also created my own smaller font pixel-by-pixel to be able to put notation on the drawings. It took like 40 5.25" diskettes to backup the hard drive. What is that...like 10mb? Seems like a lifetime ago... Actually wish I had a copy of that old drafting program (cleverly called "Draw" if I remember correctly).
>
Renoir,

Mine was an Atari 400 (1983) with a cassette tape drive. Later, I got an 800XL with 2 5.25 diskette drives. I wrote a bunch of system level utilities in assembler for the Atari. I was really cool because the source code for the BASIC interpreter was available, as was the source for the DOS. Plus there was a memory map with all the entry points for the various I/O functions. Neat stuff.