I got hooked on space with possibly with the last Mercury flight or with Gemini (not yet in school). This was followed by getting hooked on nuclear physics at age 11. My first exposure to computers was probably 1977, with some HP desktop thing that had cassette tape. TheRegister thinks that everyone over 40 has used a ZX81, I never have. The business I worked at in high school had a teletype, so I have worked with paper tape. The first assignment or two in university on computing, used cards. After finishing my two engineering degrees, I worked with 8 inch floppy disks and a real Winchester in a PDP-11. I have written a FORTRAN program which did garbage collection for a VAX 11/785 (dynamical system which dropped equations at random).