Definitely a gateway drug. I had an Apple ][+ around that time too. The manuals for that were incredible. Luckily, my dad's startup had tons of old hardware for it. Printers, Koala Pad, plenty of disk drives, modem, EPROM programmer, 80 Column Card with C/PM and Pascal.... even though it was about 10 years old, it was great. But the C64 always seemed far more approachable. That brown box with the clacky keys... And I was too young to know about Djkstra's "Goto Considered Harmful". It probably could have made me a far better engineer if I had picked up better habits sooner.