Oh me too, This was my programming bible:
pah - back in my day.... . (4 yorkshiremen sketch)...
I had to write Space Invaders on a Z80 with nowt but op codes as I couldn't afford the assembler ! Using bottle caps and sponge on a pcb to make buttons... even had marching music for the invaders.. Really rocked...
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I wanted one of these:
Don't know whether to admit this or not... I've still got my BBC Model-B up in the loft.
I seem to remember I bought a large mouse for it and a graphics package as well as an external harddrive (was just like a house brick). I was involved with a group of programmers from Cambridge University writing COMAL-80 (structured BASIC) for the Beeb.
Like many people, I seem to have some spare time so I might venture into the loft and check it out.
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Ah-hem,
I was good enough with punch cards at one point that I could hand correct them - we had tiny silver sticky labels and a small hand punch.
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I very nearly brought a Euro Card based system (running CP/M) as my first. However, as I was making my mind up, the BBC Micro was announced. It was light-years ahead of anything else at the price-point. I was a mainframe operator at the time.
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As the youngsters have probably left by now:
I remember a colour measurement system I was responsible for, specified by Marks & Spencer that was programmed with punched tape:
The instructions were "After starting the re-programming by pressing button A, pull the paper tape through the reader at a rate of approximately 1 foot a second until the red lamp lights"
The computer had 16k Core Memory, the memory card was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
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... indeed the origin of the phrase "to patch a program"
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I have to relate a story.
Background: When I was in High School run by an order of brothers, a frind of mine on day say he was going to the computer room (which was the sixe of a small office) and I tagged along. There were two paper tape leyboard machines. One was connected to a PDP-11 at a local high school. The other was so you could type your progran right onto the paper tape. It ran focal-7: one instruction per line, maximun 40 lines. No screen just printing to the paper.
So one day, one of the brothers was giving a tour of the school to two nuns. He brought them to the room and told them this was the computer room "Ohhh..." they said "What is a computer?"
At that the brother reached into the trash can and pulled out a strip of paper tape and fed it into the maching and said "Here, watch this!" and he started the tape reader and out was printed
..F*** YOU...F*** YOU...F*** YOU... (I replaced some of the letters with astricks)
To my horror, they closed the room for two weeks.
I still haven gotten over it.... 
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Here is to add to the items mentioned in all the post above. I found these items to be least expensive (US $5 including ESP8266) in most of the cases to make a meaningful sensor.
https://github.com/happytm/BatteryNode . Please look at hardware section.
Thanks.
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