Heathkit

Since our father is an electrical engineer he would sometimes build electronic devices. He had built a very nice stereo receiver from a kit he bought at Heathkit. My brothers and I enjoyed reading through the Heathkit catalogs that would arrive in the mail.

There were many different kinds of computers that could be bought from Heathkit at that time including the H-8, the H-11 and the microprocessor trainer ET-3400 which had a breadboarding area, could be programmed in machine code and could also be expanded to drive a terminal and be programmed in BASIC.

We spent a lot of time fantasizing about these and other machines, but we never got to see one in person. Computers were too expensive for kids with paper routes. Of course that would all change very soon.