This is very similar to my earliest experience.
My very, very first experience: the elementary school had a teletype terminal to a computer at a university, one that required dialling the mainframe on a rotary phone and putting the handset on two rubber cups. Then we often played either Oregon Trail or Star Trek, amazed at the high tech.
Some time later, I recall first seeing Space War in a roller skating rink when I was there with the Cub Scouts for some outing or another. Everyone else was gathered around the air hockey table, but the vector graphics of that early video game system fascinated me.
In 1978 I discovered BYTE Magazine, and David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games. About the same time we got a computer lab, outfitted with the Apple ][. And I discovered that I loved finding out how games worked more than I loved playing them, and the rest is history.
