TRS-80 Model II was the first home computer I got to play with. Zork baby, yeahhhh.
Before that, I poked around on a VAX PDP-8 via a VT52 terminal. They university had just installed them to save money on paper... people used to use line printers and teletext's to develop / run / debug programs back then. Universities and businesses would go through tremendous amounts of 132-column-wide carriage feed paper before the VTs got cheap enough to be adopted universally.
Ah, childhood memories.