O'Reilly's Gnat Torkington has collected "How I Got into Computers" stories from many of the geeks in the O'Reilly orbit, and he's publishing them on O'Reilly Radar:
When I was a kid in New Zealand, my parents were dirt-poor, with my Dad subsistence fishing. While Mum was pregnant with my sister, they saved and saved, and in the year of my 8th birthday I got not only a little sister but also a Commodore 64. I began playing games, and rapidly learned programming. I was fascinated by text adventures and platform games, and still have a warm spot in my heart for Infocom, Manic Miner, and Impossible Mission.
I started off programming in BASIC, with all the PEEKs and POKEs required to do cool things. The Commodore 64 came with a great manual that showed you basic audio and video hacks, and there were sample programs on the C30 tapes that came with Commodore's "Learn to Program" series. The C64 had amazing video and audio chips, ahead of their time, and I had fun making sound effects and emulating the multicolored video bars that hacked games showed while loading. I ended up learning machine language (assembly and ML were conflated a lot in those days) and still associate A9 in hex with LDA. I never did learn how to put software into the 1541 disk drive, though, as the best disk copying programs did.
