I first had access to a PDP-1170 at my local university, then a borrowed Apple II, then my first computer was a Vic-20. Then a C-64, then the beta Mac.
The Apple II and Vic-20 were both 8-bit computers. The minis and mainframes at universities were 16 and 32-bit systems, but for the large part I just ignored the word-length of a system. I really only cared if I needed to work in assembler, which I preferred for a good 15 years. I generally work in C flavored C++, and don't really optimize via process bit knowledge until bottlenecks are being removed.
