How did you get involved in programming?
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
I had a passion for electronics, but it was expensive in 1973 when I was in 6th grade. A 7476 flip flop cost $4 at Radio Shack, and that was 1973 money that a 6th grader didn't have. So I walked up to the third floor of the school that I was at, walked into the computer room, read the instructions on how to start a terminal session on a teletype machine (with a punch tape!). Instructions said "Press CTRL+C" to start. I did. The computer promptly crashed. Turned out that the PDP-11's mag tape drive shared the CPU board's power supply, and if it drew too much current, the CPU board died. I was hooked but I made a quick dash for the exit thinking I'd really broken something and didn't venture back into the "computer room" until 7th grade. In 7th grade I struggled to understand how the computer new that if I said:
10 let a = 5
15 let b = 10
20 print a + bthat it "knew" that a was 5. I needed to understand how computer memory worked. One day, I just "got it." By 8th grade I was teaching BASIC to the seniors in the high school. The rest is history. Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Contributors Wanted for Higher Order Programming Project! Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
When I was about 10, my Dad was at the Consumer Electronics Show when it was in Chicago, IL. He saw and purchased a Timex Sinclair XZ80 there for $100. 1K RAM with the optional 4K RAM module! Saved programs on a tape recorder and cassette tapes. Display was an old B&W TV. Programming lang was BASIC. My Dad was a sheet metal worker who learned sheet metal skills while in the Navy. Also did HVAC and roofing. He was always the one who stressed education, especially learning how to learn things on your own. My Dad wasn't particularly tech-savvy like people are now. His own era's tech (TV, radio, stereos, plastics, etc.) always interested him. But he saw the future in computers and bought one when he had the chance so the whole family could learn. But that last part didn't happen. I was the only one in the family to gravitate to it. He worked with it a little and found it interesting. It came pretty easy to me. I was the one who could do 8-12 hrs/day learning and working with it. I wound up learning to program BASIC by reading and typing in programs all the time, mostly games, from programming books and computer magazines, studying a BASIC language reference guide and how the computer actually did things internally. He was the one who put it in my mind that computers are the future and I would be able to make a good, life-long living if you understand them and how to program them. To me it was fun and challenging. I knew what I was going to do with my life since I was 10. Dad passed away when I was 14, the summer between 8th grade and freshman year in HS. At the time we started programming classes in junior year of HS, I already had been programming for about 6 years on my own. One class was programming on an IBM System/360. Another was my first experience with an IBM PC, programming in (wait for it...) BASIC. And that was my first introduction to a company called Microsoft. Used their BASIC interpreter. Unfortunately, my Dad passed away about the time he and I started learning about the stock market, before anything there made sense to me. So I didn't know that I could buy stock in Microsoft as a company. I never put 2 and 2 together on that one around the time they went public. Had my Dad been around for about another year, I think things would have turned out a LOT differently for us in the financial arena. I outgrew the TS ZX80 and moved on to a Radio Shack Color Computer (CoCo
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
In 1969, my high school started a computer programming pilot program using an IBM System/360[^], which I enrolled in. All of our programs were in Fortran IV, punched on 80 column punch cards. My first program computed the sum of the first 10 integers, and worked correctly the first time (the classic "Hello World" had not yet been invented). The computer had a quite respectable 2 Megabytes of memory. I was amazed at the things I could do with this newfangled device, and was smitten. Nowadays, there is more programming power in an Apple watch.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that... - Harvey
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
It all started for me when I was given a Commodore 64 by my parents, we had Atari2600 games console before this, and obviously this was the next step. It wasn't ApplevsGoogle back then, it was Commodore vs Spectrum. Did the usual copying long programs out of magazines, just to get a ?Syntax Error. After the C64, I moved onto the Amiga500. But it wasn't until I left school and joined BP on their apprenticeship scheme for Offshore Oil&Gas, we started to get taught simple programming as part of the course, I remember we used a BBC Micro for this. After doing the basic into to the syntax, keywords, program flow/logic etc. one of the exercises that still sticks in my mind was to write a program in as few lines/characters as possible that wrote out to screen the all verses of "10 green bottles". A couple years laters on the apprenticeship, we were into microprocessor programming, and still remember punching strings of hex codes into so CPU evaluation board. I went offshore in 1992 as an instrument tech, and that's where the interest really picked up (The instrument department had 386 laptop that was the envy of everyone onboard) as we had to do the programming on the plant controllers, plc's etc. However, on nightshift, it was pretty quiet, so I started to teach myself Visual Basic (VB3) and then progressed through the versions, into .Net and then made the switch to C# as my language of choice in probably around 2011. If was not long after going offshore that I purchased my first PC at home. Took a loan out from the bank for it, it was a Escom 486 DX2 66. I remember having to justify to the bank why I wanted it! From that point, there was no going back really. :)
Dave Find Me On:Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
-
I was 12 years old and stumbled into a Radio Shack. There they had a brand new TRS-80 (Model I), all alone, switched on and the manual right next to it. And no, my parents had no computer before then. They thought I was crazy and did not intend to buy one, so I scraped together the few bucks I had and got myself a kit like this one[^] and built it myself. Actually it's still work in progress. Just last week I worked on a graphics card with a second CPU, so that the main CPU finally can run at its maximum clock frequency.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns. -
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
It was that kid down the road, Charles who got me started. Him and his bloody girlfriend Ada!
veni bibi saltavi
-
It was that kid down the road, Charles who got me started. Him and his bloody girlfriend Ada!
veni bibi saltavi
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
I was 6 or 8, I can't remember and my parents took me to a trade fair where it was a booth with some super old computers (new at that time) they had installed a sum and rest simple program I played with a little. That was my first contact, I loved it and started going to academies to learn MSDOS, GWBASIC, DBASE III and IV, LOTUS 123 and C.
[www.tamautomation.com] | Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing. [YouTube channel]
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
I loved to play using computer and then started to know about google and chat things. I also want to know what they actually do with computer and slowly learned flash then got interested in web designing. Slowly came across the technology and finally changed as full stack developer.
-
I did it for the nookie.
Jeremy Falcon
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
I did it for the nookie.
So you can take that cookie
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
Mostly at school. Had a great teacher, and that fitted my introverted self.
I'd rather be phishing!
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
The best Christmas gift I ever got was a TI/994a back in '83. Not only was it good for games, but best of all I could write programs that solved problems, like math or geometry homework. I could even use the cassette drive to save, then reload my programs!..until the interface gave out! I didn't really deal with computers again until I started college a few years later, becoming a CS major and learned the basics of c, pascal, and fortran, before finding a part-time job that became full-time, and kept me out of the lab....I wound up quitting school and became a press operator for most of the next 10 years. When I decided that I was ready to go back and finish school in '98, the programming world was in a much different place than I had left it...you didn't just type in programs into a terminal in the lab and pray that they compiled, then print out your code and results on greenbar paper. :laugh: Finally, I could do my 'lab' work at home, at any hour of the day!
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
I was working as chemist at time, and we got an Inductively Coupled Argon Plasma Spectrophotometer that used a PDP-11 for massaging the detector signals. I thought it would be nice if we could get elemental composition percentages during the analysis. So I learned PDP-11 assembly and wrote a statistics program. Then I wrote some programs to work with gas spectro results when the ICAP was not being used. Things kinda got out of hand after that, and I wound up owning a computer store (anybody remember KayPro?) and doing custom programming for the oil driling industry in Alaska.
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
For me it was a bit of accident / luck. When I was younger I wanted to join the Army as a mechanic. But then I lost the hearing in my left ear and that was the end of that. So while my dad was still in hte army and working in Germany I joined the Youth Training Scheme and started to work for the Small System Group for the army. My first introduction to programming was a system for SSAFA, a housing system. When I returned to the UK I started Uni and got my first job real IT job after that.
Every day, thousands of innocent plants are killed by vegetarians. Help end the violence EAT BACON
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
My father worked in a hospital in the communist Hungary...One way to get equipment from the west was via sealed containers of electronics...Some of the electronics were not used after examination (didn't fit?) and the employees could buy if relatively cheap...So I got a C64...And the rest, they say, is history...
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
-
How did you get involved in programming? Surely, you must have heard about a computer before somewhere in your lifetime, and then for some reason, you decided to go into programming, either for fun or for profit or both. Also, how did you become aware of the existence of the computer? Did your family have a personal computer when you were little? Were you a mathematician?
School, mid 1970s. A couple of maths teachers (Rick Dunsby & Brian Thomas) ran a computing "club". We started with, IIRC, Casio FX-201P programmable calculators and then they got hold of one of these..... MONROBOT-XI[^] Picture[^] Ours had only the one TTY and (paper) tape reader/punch. Integer arithmetic only, no divide or multiplication operators, hand assembly of mnemonics to op codes and no editing of entered code. Make a balls-up part way through typing a routine in and you had to re-enter it all from scratch. Mind you it was only marginally slower to boot (10 or 15 minutes) than a Windoze PC and most of that time was waiting for the drum to get up to speed. Unfortunately Mr. Dunsby then went on to build a micro based on the 6800 which ran (a) Kansas City Basic and it was all downhill from there. :)
-
At the time I was going to college I was learning to use a slide rule and the college just started a computer program and I figured it would be easier to learn to program a computer then a slide rule. I was wrong!
New version: WinHeist Version 2.2.2 Beta
I told my psychiatrist that I was hearing voices in my head. He said you don't have a psychiatrist!You inspired me to dig out one of my old slide rules. ... And I can't remember how to use the damned thing!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
