6502.org

My first experience with programming was with Mr Coffee, BigTrek, Light-Brite and Fidelity Chess Challenger that had a Z80 CPU.

Chess Challenger helped tutor me in relational calculus early on; Chess and SQL both are forms of RC.

Lite-brite helped with designing and understanding multicolor pixel graphics.

BigTrek was a visual programming paradigm like Logo where you could run programs right away after keying them in and run a trace literally and debug in real time.

Mr Coffee was like the DartMouth BASIC experiment on a larger and simpler scale more people could participate in.

Next I used a Teletype and then a 4K TRS-80. Programming concepts were more familiar because of the progression from these programmable machines.

My first access to a 'computer' was with the EuroCom 1. My dad brought it home from the school where he taught.
It's hard to find any info on that 6802 system these days but it had 7 segment LED display, hex input keyboard and a cassette interface.
I was far too young to be able to afford a real computer and sometimes got a chance to use an Apple ][.
The first computer I bought was an Acorn Atom, actually it was the Prophet2. Had some extra features and great looking orange return key.
My math teacher gave me a huge stack of Acorn Nieuws so I was hooked and learned quickly to mod my Atom.
In a few year the Atom grew to a system with a 65SC816 (fast) 32KB (noise free) video memory, floppy disk and more.
When I went to the Uni I got my hands on an Acorn Archimedes. Practically all my computers after that would be ARM based.

So, filling in the poll was a bit difficult. It said 'bond' and therefore I chose the 6502 but the 6802 was my first experience and it taught me to use a monitor utility to type in the machine code. I would write down my assembly and the machine code before typing the hex characters..

Its been the best experience and never regret learning to code like that.

Edit: found this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kvLvrTxEo0 to a short view of a EuroCom 1. The one in the video looks a bit different but that's okay.

There are some resources for the euroCom 1 to be found on the internet archive.
The full scanned manual is a great resource and brings back some fond memories

My first computer was the Timex 1000, but between the slow execution, the keyboard and the crashing when the 16KB RAM module was installed, I never bonded with it. It is, however, quite compact, so it was a perfectly closet compatible computer until some of my things were damaged by flooding in a storage unit when I was teaching Maths in Grenada in the mid 80's.

So the first computer I bonded with was the Commodore 64 that I received due to a benefit check from the VA (it was my dad who was the veteran - he'd served in the Chemical Corps after completing his MA in Chemistry during the 50's in the days of the peacetime draft) ... and with it bought a C64, 1541 disk drive and monochrome monitor. There was already a compact color TV available as a color monitor. That was the one I bonded with, with Basic and laboriously entered computer magazine programs not long after giving way to SuperForth64.

I briefly had a C128D, but I fried its CPU by plugging the parallel port interface power tap into the datasette port upside down, so it was the C64, by that time with 1541 and 1581 disk drives and a daisywheel printer that was basically a garage conversion of a daisywheel typewriter that I took with me to grad school in 1989, nearly a decade later.

I love these stories because of the little details they bring up. The ZX81 (Timex 1000 in the US) was notorious for its wobbly 16kB RAM pack which would crash the machine if you exhaled too strongly whilst in the same room as it. I remember playing the Psion Flight Simulator on a friend's machine (which ignited a love of flight sims that continues to this day), and we went through the crash a few times as the game requires a lot of key presses, and it doesn't take much to nudge the unit enough to upset the RAM pack. There were various schemes to fix it in place, from velcro to sticky tape to trays and brackets... a whole industry of back-of-magazine ads for keeping your ZX81 from resetting.

They didn't have clever video or audio hardware or good keyboards, but the ZX line was cheap and all the BASIC keywords were printed on the keys which essentially put the BASIC keyword reference right in front of you.

My word processor for High School English Composition was a manual typewriter passed down to me by my retired Grandmother (retired from being a HS English teacher, in fact), which I typed on with erasable onion skin paper ... which continued to be my word processor until I got my "garage retrofit" daisywheel printer.

So with the kind of typing I was used to, I could have held my breath and just typing would still make it crash.

Ugh! The 128DCR is my favourite Commodore computer. It's the finest 8-bit machine they ever made.

The functioning parts of that upgrade that survived were my 1581 and my Warpspeed speedloader cart. A later acquisition of Big Blue Reader was what I originally relied on to sneaker-net files from the school IBM-XT equipped computer lab to my C64 set-up in my apartment in my first years in grad school.