When I was thirteen, my mom got me an electric typewriter for Christmas. It didn’t work, so we had to take it back to Radio Shack. I convinced her to get me a TRS-80 Color Computer instead (they were both $50—so an even trade). It had 4k and no permanent storage. I booted every day, wrote programs and then when I shut it off, those programs were gone.

The next year I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas, but still without a disk drive. The only thing you could do with this computer was program it in BASIC, which is what I did.

When I was sixteen, I was taking digital electronics in high school. Some students in the class wrote a version of The Twelve Days of Christmas except with the names of chips instead of the usual gifts. The only line I can remember is “Five 555’s”.