Poll: Which 8-bit computer got you into programming

Muh 486DX66 running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with QBasic.

Muh Nibbles! Muh Gorillas!

whoever put in amstrad.... wow... I was not even expecting it here :-)

Amstrad CPC 464, Amstrad 6128 etc... :) Feeling old :)

31 years ago, almost to the day (it was the last day of school), my father brought home an Apple IIe with two disk drives, a monochrome monitor, and 128 kilobytes of RAM. It came with two floppy disks, "System Master" and "Sample Programs", and several spiral-bound books: Applesoft Tutorial, the DOS Manual, Reference Manual. I was eleven years old.

I plugged the computer in, put a disk in the drive, turned it on. It beeped, whirred for a while, and a flashing cursor appeared. "Now what?" I wondered. I typed a few words and pushed Return. "?SYNTAX ERROR", it said.

I cracked open the "Applesoft Tutorial", which was in English -- not my mother tongue -- , and proceeded to type in the first program I saw. And then:

  ]RUN
  HELLO. WHAT'S YOUR NAME? APRICOT
  NICE TO MEET YOU, APRICOT.
  YOUR NAME REVERSED IS TOCIRPA.
  ]

I was hooked. I spend the following weeks teaching myself enough English to be able to understand the manual, and learned BASIC by typing stuff it and seeing what it did. Then my parents gave me a subscription to Nibble, a magazine that had an interesting mix of technical articles, product reviews, and many programs to type in. I learned a lot from reading those programs. When summer ended and I went to junior high, I met with older kids who had a better command of programming and eventually graduated to 6502 assembly language, and even did a bit of hardware hacking, thanks to a wonderful book called "The Apple II Circuit Description".

I learned FOCAL on a PDP-8/L, the first computer I'd ever seen that didn't fill a basement. Fun little language, where arrays were undeclared and sparse. I think every array element you wrote to probably created a symbol table entry. Sure did take a long time to load FOCAL's paper tape on an ASR/33. Maybe a load would fail 20% of the time and you'd have to reload. Ah, the glory days.