My father was a tradesman who could turn his hand to anything — and he had, in the late seventies, acquired a Commodore PET. I have no idea why. I was very young. What I remember is not a lesson in computing; it's more fundamental than that. I remember understanding, for the first time, that a machine could be talked to. That it would wait for you. That it would respond. This sounds small. At the time it felt enormous.

The PET taught me that computers existed. The BBC Model B, encountered at school in 1983, taught me something more specific: precision. The BBC was unforgiving in a way that I now appreciate and then found briefly maddening. A BASIC listing with a single character wrong didn't do something funny. It just didn't work. There was no negotiation, no partial credit. You were right or you were wrong, and if you were wrong you found out immediately. I loved it, actually. Still do. Systems that tell you the truth promptly are underrated.

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum — the 48K version at a neighbour's house, then my own 128K+2A — taught me to be suspicious of the tape. If you loaded programs from cassette on a Spectrum, you knew failure. The counter would tick up, the coloured stripes would flash on the border, and then at some arbitrary point the whole thing would give up. You'd rewind and try again. And again. And then, occasionally, it would work, and you felt like you'd achieved something, which was probably not the lesson Sinclair intended but was the lesson you got. The tape taught me that storage is not reliable, that you can do everything right and still fail, and that this is worth factoring in.

The Goldstar 8086 with its Hercules orange monochrome display was a machine my father also had at some point — I remember it very specifically because the amber of the screen was a particular, slightly warm orange that I've never seen reproduced. You couldn't mistake it for anything else. It taught me, via DOS, that the interface between human and computer is a choice, not an inevitability. That someone decided there would be a prompt and a cursor and a specific way of entering commands, and that someone else could have decided differently.

The school Opus 8086 clones were beige and boring and completely interchangeable, but they taught me something the home machines didn't: that computing in an institutional setting is always slightly worse than computing at home, because the machines are shared and the configurations are locked down and the software is two versions behind. I've never fully shaken that lesson. It explains a lot about how I feel about managed infrastructure.

The Windows 286 full-colour PS/2 at school — I think there were two of them, treated as something of a special occasion — taught me that colour was not the same thing as better. It was prettier. The applications were the same. The Viglen 286 that came later was basically the same machine with a different badge. I stop remembering them individually at this point because they started blurring.

The Archimedes A2000 at Raincliffe school was genuinely interesting and I'm not sure it got the credit it deserved. RISC OS had an elegance to it — you could feel that someone had thought carefully about how a desktop should work, even if the thought was occasionally wrong. The Acorn world felt like a road not taken. I still think that occasionally.

The Tandy 286 with dual 3.5" floppies, the Olivetti 486 with its proper VGA, the escalating series of machines through the nineties — each one was faster, more capable, and slightly less interesting than the previous one. The interesting things had happened in the constraint. When there was no hard drive, you thought carefully about what you stored. When the screen was monochrome, you thought carefully about what information actually needed to be on it. Abundance is generous and slightly dulling at the same time.

The iBook was when things became genuinely enjoyable again. Then the MacBook Air — I was in heaven with that machine, the weight of it, the battery life, the sense that someone had thought carefully about what a portable computer should feel like to carry. The MacBook Pro that followed it.

I don't think the specific machines matter as much as the sequence. What you grow up with shapes the questions you think to ask. I learned about constraints before I learned about abundance, and I think that ordering made me a better person to hand a hard problem to. Or at least a more patient one. Possibly both.