I learned BASIC on a TI/994a sometime in 1982 I think. At first it was fun and games, making the screen change colors, playing sounds, etc...then I realized that this thing can actually help with my geometry homework!
I was a CS major until '88 when I got burned out on school and spent a decade in box plants. When I came to my senses and went back to school, I was delighted to find that the world had changed...no more waiting for lab terminals...I could now write, debug, and compile code at home...in the middle of the night! I got my first windows PC (98 1st ed.) and a copy of Visual Studio 6. Within a year, I was working part-time on a new project that I am still maintaining to this day. It's been a great ride, wfh for the last 20 years.
The earlier days of writing code were probably the most fun...the nights staying up until 2AM because you were 'on a roll', building new stuff and learning new stuff every day. This was before Google when I accumulated lots of big thick books and anxiously awaited the arrival of the quarterly MSDN CD.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and although I still find joy in solving problems, I wouldn't call it fun. There's a lot less building new stuff and a lot more maintaining/migrating old stuff these days and that's definitely not fun!
One difference is that back then, you could actually get away from it all just by leaving the house/office. Cell phones have now made that impossible. Now we are constantly bombarded by spam calls, bored retired relatives, emails, text messages, group texts, game notifications, fb notifications, etc. Back then, I could code in peace for hours and hours...nowadays, I code in 20-minute sprints if I'm lucky, even on weekends.
