My grandfather, who worked in electronics and ham radios, bought one of these. He didn't care for programming and gave it to me. "Here's the computer, the manuals, the wires and a black-and-white TV. You might like this. I didn't."

I grew up in a modest-income household and didn't get a lot of good guidance from my parents. My dad literally told me that I should not learn to work with computers because they would "think for me".

I learned it despite my father. I consider his hand-me-down gift as one of the most significant gifts in my life, as building computer software has been my career for over 25 years.