Comment by kijiki

I arguably owe a successful career in tech to my dad seeing a $99 deal on a TI-99 after they were discontinued in the mid 80's and buying it just because he had had a shortwave receiver as a child and saw some weird similarity. Unbeknownst to him, it turned out my mother had been a FORTRAN programmer in the 70's (though she described it as working as a lab-tech in a bio lab), and taught me how to program it in its weird BASIC dialect.