I made my own at around the age of 8.
It was made of two wooden planks, one of them full of nails (those were the keyboard buttons), the other had a rectangle with rounded corners drawn on it (that was the screen). We played a lot with it on our imaginary space station (a pile of firewood) with my cousin.
You can imagine how big of a change came to my life when my mother got a C64 from somewhere. Those buttons… clicked! And when i pressed them something happened on the screen! This was when i was 10, so around 1993; PCs were already available but we couldnʼt afford one.
I remember having a vinyl disc from the band KFT. The cover had the source code of a game on it which i enthusiastically typed on the C64 only to find out it doesnʼt work as it was written for the ZX Spectrum. Nevertheless i learned a lot about programming during that time. It was awesome.