I could swear I’ve written about this before, but I can’t find it, so it must’ve never escaped Twitter

My first computer
I could swear I’ve written about this before, but I can’t find it, so it must’ve never escaped Twitter.
My very very first computer was this bad boy, which I had when I was… geez, I’m not even sure. 7, maybe?
The VTech PreComputer 1000, from back in the days when “1000” still sounded futuristic. It had a screen with one entire row of pixellated LCD characters, a qwerty keyboard complete with Caps Lock (?!), and a wide variety of trivia games. Ran on six C batteries.
I seem to recall that the behavior of Caps Lock was to reverse the usual capitalization, by which I mean holding Shift while Caps Lock was on would produce lowercase characters. Wild. (edit: A great many people have informed me that this is in fact how Windows always worked, which surprises me a lot, because I very distinctly remember being surprised by a real computer’s behavior! It seems that at least some combination of MS-DOS 6.22 and a particular keyboard model would ignore Shift when Caps Lock is on, so maybe that’s what I remember.)
In a kind of precursor to DLC, there were also several extra cartridges you could buy. They were about the size of a thick wallet and came with different sets of… more trivia games.
Then there was the part that changed my life forever: a built-in BASIC interpreter.
It was a huge, huge pain in the ass. I could only see or edit one line at a time, of course. There was also no writable internal storage — this machine was released in 1988, when the idea of a video game that could save your progress was still novel! — so any program I wrote was lost as soon as I turned the thing off.
It did come with a book full of documentation and sample programs. The documentation was helpful enough to get me to make some things, but perhaps not particularly well aimed at the target audience of 9-year-olds, as I remember there being several constructs I didn’t understand in the slightest. The sample programs weren’t described particularly well, had no comments at all, and at the longest ran beyond 30 lines. 30 lines doesn’t sound like a lot to me now, but it was the biggest program I’d ever seen at the time, and typing it all in on a one-line display was daunting. (There were nine “canonical” sample programs baked into the ROM, but the programming tutorial had several lengthy examples that had to be typed in.)
I really wish I could find a copy of the book online, but it predates the web, alas! This was all so long ago that I can’t really remember any of the sample programs. I want to say there was the usual “guess a number” game, a temperature converter,