[ghoul2]

Whoa. Are you me?

Same here. Lived in India, my fathers' friend (based in the UK) gifted him a ZX Spectrum. I was hooked from the day I typed 10 PRINT "myname" on it. Taught myself Z80 assembly, just from the appendix in the Spectrum programmers manual that listed the opcode encodings and mnemonics (mostly just guessing what the opcode did from the mnemonic) - at around 10 years old, I could hand-write and hand-encode the assembly code without needing to lookup the opcode encodings.

I was 6 years old at the time.

Completely determined the trajectory of my life/career.