I remember the stories about the some of the games, real time strategy was a genre which started on the tabletop but really evolved into something more on the PC platform especially. I was really too young to remember as I started on the MS-DOS operating system and I believe I learnt how to type before I learnt how to read or write by copying my mother and father to boot up games.
Not real time strategy, turn-based. I started more or less the same way (probably have the CS degree because of all the stuff I had to learn to get those DOS games to actually work), but my father was a war gamer in College (the 70s equivalent of the modern gamer) and would bring back copies of new games from work (the 80s equivalent of torrenting) with photo copied manuals (for the questions they would ask you to prevent piracy). The main advantage was that you didn't have to memorize the rules, and the serious war games had a lot of them.
