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I'm casting my mind back to my first encounter with these things as a schoolchild.

I stared in absolute wonder at an early electronic calculator, imaging some sort of organic brain at work inside.

I couldn't understand why a ZX81 that I saw didn't have a bank of flickering lights and I sort of expected it to be "threatening" in some spooky way.

Then I got a summer job in an IT company at 16 years old, I sat down in a lunch break at a disconnected VT100 terminal and tried to type in a BASIC program, finally typing "RUN" at the end.

I expected UNIX hardware to be covered in cooling fins, that they would be buzzing and humming at 50Hz and any wrong move would trigger a disastrous sequence of events.