The slogan on Compute!'s back page showed the Commodore 64 at $600, then $300, then $199 at Toys R Us. As a twelve-year-old earning five dollars daily at my parents' gift shop, I convinced them to buy it for my education—then spent my savings on Pooyan. My father caught me swapping joysticks from the Atari 2600.

That 64 kilobytes machine taught me programming through pirated games with no instructions—trial and error became my coding bedrock. Sports simulations like Hardball! taught me baseball strategy, letting me join male camaraderie.

When my Austrian uncle Josef visited, we bonded wordlessly over the C64; he later mailed me games on 5 ¼" floppy disks, my first international mail. A 1660 Modem at 300 baud connected me to local BBSes, leading to friendships and a high school job.

I wrote my first novel, *Between the Stitches*, on Paperclip word processor, filling two disks. Today I'm a Lead Application Developer at a Fortune 500 company—all because my parents bought that breadbin-shaped computer forty years ago.