I have a vague childhood memory of standing in Debenhams, or another similar department store, in Manchester city centre aged about 5 or 6, whilst my parents debated purchasing something that would entertain and inspire me for the best part of the next decade.
It was an Acorn Electron.
For those who fall either side of Generation-Y-ers like me, this was one of the crop of home computers that appeared in the early 80s. In between the early Atari-style home gaming system and the advent of Nintendo, the BBCs, the Amstrads and the Spectrums provided us with the gaming that is now common-place.
They also had an advantage that no console could provide: We could program them. In fact, we were encouraged to. As soon as you opened it up, it would beep with the BBC basic prompt
The computer came with a book explaining how to write simple programs, but that was just a foretaste of the books and magazines listing how to get more (by today's standards painfully slow and basic) programs out of the beige box of delights.
Did this turn me into a programmer? Not really. I now occasionally code for fun, but have never for profit. What it did teach me was an understanding of systems. Of how to relate the messy world of humans to the IF...THEN...ELSE loop. Of how to represent what I wanted to see as 8x8 icons and how to manipulate that. It didn't make me systematic, but it helped me generalise the qualitative so that I could make it fit.
So when someone doesn't do what I want them to, I can think in terms of what systems approach can I take to help us resolve the issue. When a gadget doesn't work, I think of the electricity flowing through as if it was a program needing debugging. When something needs repeating, I think of it as a FOR loop.
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