Like probably a lot of my generation, I grew up playing around with a Commodore 64. But it was pretty useless for anything except games. The real computer, an IBM PC kept in a locked room in the basement, was too expensive for them to dare letting me play with it, given my habit of dismantling everything I touched. (A habit I still have, fed regularly by my computer maintenance work. I'm just a lot better at putting things back together now. )

My first real computer was an IBM PC 80286-12 assembled from the detritus of old upgrades to the "main" computer. It had DOS, QBASIC, IBM Writing Assistant(anyone remember that?) and enough storage to hold thousands of handwritten programs. I continuously upgraded it all the way from grade school, through high school, and by the time I dropped out of college to pursue work experience it was a dual Opteron running Gentoo Linux.