I broke into the world of computers and technology at around the ripe old age of 10. Not so amazing really, but remember…that was in 1984…back when most people on the street didn’t know what a computer was. The day my father came home from Radio Shack with a brand new Tandy 
1000 was the beginning of what has turned into a passion for technology.
The Tandy 1000, introduced in 1984, was manufactured to compete directly with the IBM PC. The one I had came standard 128Kb of RAM, one double density 5.25″ floppy disk drive and a 16 color RGB monitor. As add-ons, dad had the foresight to also purchase a matching dot-matrix printer and a Tandy joystick. The system ran on MS DOS 2.11 (maybe the most stable Microsoft OS to date?) and came bundled with DeskMate 1.0. DeskMate was pretty remarkable for it’s time. It was a word processor, spreadsheet, database and calendaring suite that fit on a single 5.25″ floppy…let’s see Microsoft Office do that!
Messing with DeskMate (not me and version 2, but still the same DeskMate)
Wow, you have a very cool dad. My story was a little different. It was my grandmother who bought a computer for us, her grandchildren. It was 1989, I was in second year high school. The computer was, I think, a PC100 IBM clone. I’m not really sure. I taught my self typing using typing tutor which my computer programmer church mate shared with us. She was also teaching me Basic programming that time. I remember how long it took us to wait before anything useful can be shown in the screen when we were using a word processor then. A lot of our time was usually wasted while waiting for minor changes on the screen to show up. Wow, those were exciting days for me. I eventually started playing with “Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego” and… well…that’s a different story. Those were the days. Lol.