Wow, yeah seems like we come from a similar place. my first machine was a Tandy trs80. My family couldn't afford it, but someone as church (they were all about church) had one as a prestige thing, didn't know what to do with it, and when we visited, toddler me figured out how to make smiley faces etc on the screen. So they lent it to us. At that time, as I'm sure you remember, computers were 'the thing of the future', and they wanted to encourage me. Next someone gave me a ZX81 with a mighty 1k RAM. Couldn't do much with that. But when the 48k Sinclair spectrum came out with its weird version of basic, I was right on track! Me and my little brothers, all of us under 10, going to the only shop in town that sold computer games. On cassette. Then I got into the BBC B. That fucker was an amazing machine imo. Basic interpreter, but you could code in assembly and compile. What a learning tool. It was about then I started getting curious about AI and artificial life. When I was 14 I wrote a chat bot in turbo Pascal, that was supposed to learn from responses, build a database of associated nouns. Actually the grammar was the most challenging bit. Fuckin tight code too, if I do say so myself. It was the basis of my a level project in computing. I got a B, partly because the examiners couldn't understand it, but partly TBF because it didn't really work. Couldn't pass the Turing test. Based on an Eliza, but I pushed for general. Anyway, then I got into girls and drugs and now I empty dog shit bins in the parks for a living. Ho hum. Had a lot of fun tho so not complaining.