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I'll never forget that day, my 12th birthday.

I had a brilliant year at school and my parents wanted to reward me.

They knew I loved those "videogames" of old. Back then, we had those ancient console things like Pong / Tennis / Squash / Pelota. My little cousin had a Mattel Intellivision, an incredible piece of technology back then.

So, they went to one of the handful electronics shops in town and purchased me a Commodore VIC 20. A true masterpiece of technology, with "vast amounts" of memory (all of 3583 bytes!).

The vendor did not tell them this was not a videogame.

When I opened it and connected it to the TV, I could not find a way to start any game. VIC 20 came with a true break-through idea: a massively simple and illustrated manual that would teach BASIC even to a rock. At the end of the manual itself, there were several pages with simple video-games source code.

Yes, it was normal - back then - to spend 4 hours manually copying a source code from a written book into a computer. A computer with no storage, every time you powered it off, all was lost.

This "write source code" thing, got me hooked with computers. Forever.

Shortly after, I put together my little savings and purchased a Commodore cassette recorder and later, a massive 8 kilobytes memory cartouche.

Since then, I have learned so many languages and technologies, from VAX to XENIX, from Commodore 64/128/16 to Apple II. From (some days worth of) AS400 to military systems. One hit concepts like NeXT and BeOS and staying workhorses (DOS / Windows / Linux).

However... I'll never forget that feeling of manually entering HEX machine language codes in my VIC 20... type "sys 2081" and see my first language machine routines and videogames run. Stuff I, now 13 old, imagined and created out of thin air, stuff that simply did not exist before. A young boy could create - alone - a whole video game including "high res" graphics, sound effects and music.

VIC 20 and Commodore 64 were huge influencers, there have been whole generations of developers born of those magnificent machines of old.