I'm fairly certain my first up-close-and-personal experience with a computer was when my dad brought home a Commodore VIC-20 in 1981 when I was seven years old. He was a (now-retired) aerospace engineer and Star Trek fan, so buying a home computer for himself was a dream come true. Of course, I used it far more than he ever did. He picked up a Commodore 1-button joystick and a tape drive as well, and we hooked it up to the family TV in the basement. While I didn't launch into a lifelong hacking career, I did have a lot of fun playing games (Omega Race and a Pac-Man clone called Snak-Man were favorites), along with messing around with simple BASIC programs and creating mock-ups of elaborate game screens using the graphics key functions on the VIC-20.