A friend!
At the start of the new school year (this’d be fourth grade) I had made some good friends - Fuad Ali Butt foremost. His father was a doctor, and they could afford a computer. We used to annoy his brothers by playing dambusters vigorously on their Commodore Pet, later by hogging their TRS-80 Model III to write our own basic implementations of dam busters.
Who knows if I’d be where I am today if I’d sat beside someone who did not have a home computer back then?
September 17th, 1979