Back in grade school, year 7, we were given a Honeywell Computer by the government or some such.
On it we had this "dinosaur" game. I dont recall the name of it. Where you had to collect an egg, coloured crystals, find the high tide mark "times" and had go through a swamp and through a desert. When you got it all in the end you would travek to this Island and put the egg and gems in the machine and set the temperature. At the end the combination of egg crystal and temperature would decide what hatched. I remember Terrodactyls and a stegasaurus as well as a parrot and a hard boiled egg ( got that one wrong i guess ).
So that one game got me started.