OK I start with me. In 1977 I got a Commodore Kim 1 for Christmas. I was in high school at that time. It had to be programmed in assembler via an hexadecimal keyboard. It had 1k of RAM and a 6502 1mhz CPU. It got me hook with computer science.
http://oldcomputers.net/kim1.html

Later in 1978 I got my father to buy a Tandy Radio Shack TRS 80 with 16k of RAM, a real keyboard and a real screen. It used BASIC as a programming language. What an improvment over the Kim it was!
http://oldcomputers.net/trs80i.html
I convinced my father to buy this TRS 80 because I told him that I could write a program for his accounting... which I did but took me a little while though. I remember one particular incident when I had spent 3 hours programming and lost everything when my mother unplugged the computer by mistake