|
I remember watching the Project Gemini launches when I was little back in the early 60's. While I thought astronauts were cool, at age four I think I already knew I was too much of a clumsy nerd to ever be one. I was fascinated however by the consoles in mission control. All of those buttons, lights, and screens controlling this amazing machine. I wanted to know how all of that worked.
50+ years later I'm doing the UI's for our line of commercial inkjet printing systems[^]. It's not rocket science, but it's fun.
Software Zen: delete this;
|
|
|
|
|
haha make it play doom. 
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
|
|
|
|
|
Let me put it this way. We print fast enough (up to 17 feet of paper per second) that you could play DOOM at around 50 fps on the printed paper.
Software Zen: delete this;
|
|
|
|
|
haha until you run out of ink
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
|
|
|
|
|
Our standard ink supply is a 208 liter barrel of each color: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Some customers use bulk totes that hold close to 1000 liters.
You're more likely to run out of paper. We can go through a 40,000 foot roll in less than an hour.
Software Zen: delete this;
|
|
|
|
|
I'm lazy and I saw a way to automate the onerous parts of my sales job, generating quotes. My sales manager sacked me because I was sitting around playing with excel macros instead of out selling (and yet I still met budget). I went to my biggest client and offered to convert lotus 123 macros to excel 1 (which I had sold them) and never looked back.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
|
|
|
|
|
In the good old day before the internet shipped on convenient CD's (South Africa got mainstream internet way later than 1st world countries) we played all the games we could get our hands on. Once we finished them all the only thing to do was to write our own games. I was still in primary school at the time. First year was QBASIC, but luckily 9 years of Turbo Pascal followed. I coded graphics for more than 5 years before I wrote my first "Hello World" console app.
My plan is to live forever ... so far so good
|
|
|
|
|
haha I loved QuickBASIC (the compilable version of qbasic" way back when. +1
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
|
|
|
|
|
'puzzle solving' and curiosity how to achieve something (align objects on screen, draw colors, calculate results of expressions...).
|
|
|
|
|
you sound like a fellow tinkerer. =)
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
|
|
|
|
|
naaah, just pretending 
|
|
|
|
|
me too.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
|
|
|
|
|
Before I started college, I knew I was going to have to learn programming as part of a BSEEE degree education. I found a book at the local library on FORTRAN II, and I think I memorized it. As a result, I aced my one programming class. My interest was in the analog and RF stuff that took math and physics knowledge that the digital kids couldn't fathom, so never followed up with it.
But in my second year, I got a job at another, private, University, and they had a project that had been abandoned as hopeless by the previous lab tech. It was an Altair 8800, mostly assembled then ripped apart in frustration by my predecessor. He took the documentation with him when he left. I completely disassembled it, phoned MITS to get a new schematic, and rebuilt it correctly. It still didn't work, and I figured that it was a memory card issue - 4 cards x 1k. I found the manufacturer of the cards ($400 each back then) and after talking with their tech support, applied the recommended repair procedure - hook up the power supply tabs on the card edge connector to a variable supply, set the voltage, then increase the current limiter until something smokes. That worked, removing a solder bridge from a couple of the cards.
Then came the problem of using the thing. There was no such thing as an application, nor an operating system, but there was a monitor - PL/1 I think it was - and the school was too cheap to pay for it. Fortunately, we had an ASR33 Teletype on hand, so I designed and built a S-100 card to allow the Altair to connect to the ASR33. Then, with the help of excellent documentation published by Intel, I wrote a monitor program to listen for activity on the terminal port. Once that was working, having to enter it each time in binary using the front panel switches on the Altair, I got it to send the memory dump to the paper tape punch on the ASR33. That took several tries, owing to power glitches that reset everything. But once I got that done, I could enter a mere 16 bytes of code from the front panel to make a bootstrap loader, install the tape in the reader, and toggle RUN on the front panel.
From there, the powers that were told me that their students couldn't be expected to program in Intel opcodes, so I had to make another, rather long, paper tape. Still using the native machine code, I created an Assembler, which allowed students to write (and type) programs using the customary assembly language pseudo-English notation, rather than all ones and zeroes.
Having done all that to make a collection of circuits make electrons do my bidding, I was hooked, and I entered the field of automated testing, combining hardware design with programming. I haven't had near as much fun since I left that field.
Will Rogers never met me.
|
|
|
|
|
so you're an engineer that codes. cool. =)
we could use more.
thank goodness we developers don't build bridges and skyscrapers is all I'm sayin' 
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
|
|
|
|
|
I started coding pretty much for the fun of it. I've been spending a huge heaps of time on computers for the sake of it and for the sake of fascination of tech. Coding was the next logical step.
|
|
|
|
|
makes sense. although experience has taught me that when it comes to code, logic is overrated. At least 1/3 of it is voodoo.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
|
|
|
|
|
Conway's Game of Life. I'd programmed it in the Tiny Basic, that was included in the ROM of my first home-made computer in the early 80s, and it ran so slowly that I learned 8080 assembler programming. My first 'real' language. I was hooked!
|
|
|
|
|
In 1968 I was in my final year of high school. I won a prize in the University of NSW maths competition and at the prize-giving I met a professor who told me his son was making money out of computer programming. He recommended a Fortran IV course that he was running that involved a weekly lecture over the university's radio station and submitting via the mail batch coding sheets that were punched to cards and submitted to an IBM mainframe. Making money that way sounded more attractive than the part-time work I had at a supermarket so started. Luckily the first program I wrote (5 lines long!) worked. I still have the deck of cards and the printout today. So I was encouraged to stick with it. When I got to university the following year I found the Computer Science department, graduated 4 years later, and thus began a 45 year career in programming that finished in 2017.
|
|
|
|
|
My math teacher got a TI-59 programmable calculator, which was cool! Then we got a couple of 8K PET Commodores, and I was amazed that we could store programs on a cassette tape!
Plus my senior guidance counselor was completely worthless, and I since I had no other idea what else to do with my future, I went to college for computer science.
|
|
|
|
|
A ZX Spectrum and a collection of Input Magazine[^]. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
|
|
|
|
|
**** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 ****
64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE
READY.
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
RUN■
|
|
|
|
|
Playing Oregon Trail in the 4th grade in the mid 80's.
Later when I reached 9th grade the TI-85 was hacked and someone wrote a loader for compiled binaries. Thus began my journey down the rabbit hole and began my obsession with hardware hacking and coding. I initially learned z80 assembly and basic but quickly moved on to Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and x86 Assembly. I was hugely interested in the demo scene in the 90's then windows 95 came along.
I moved on to learning Visual Basic, Visual C++ and started learning HTML, php and web development.
Eventually I did a stint with java for about 6 years and then have been doing .net and c# development for the past 8 or so.
What a ride it has been. =p
|
|
|
|
|
this is pretty familiar, we must be about the same age. The man i married was at one point - years before we even dated - a sysop of a BBS i used to log into. life's kinda funny that way.
omg the demoscene. i'm still impressed by some of that stuff.
remember oob nuking 95 machines on the internet? fun days. fortunes of a misspent youth but i was running slack and liked picking on '95 users - this was back in the days when IRC still mattered.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
|
|
|
|
|
For me, it was a case that my chosen profession (Electronics Design) was just not a viable profession in the city where I lived, so I took programming as a way to expand my options for employment and have been programming ever since. It has it's own type of excitement and sense of accomplishment which I have found is different from the sense of accomplishment with creating an electronic gizmo. I was smart as a kid too, and still can learn anything I put my mind to some 40 years later.
Having said that, I really like creating corporate intranet sites as it is very rewarding to make people happy/excited for what they can accomplish with the right solution.
mvarey
|
|
|
|
|
I was hanging paper and tapes and feeding punch cards. There was an IBM video course on Assembler in a closet. Looked like a challenge so I committed many hours of my off-work time to viewing (and reviewing) them until it stuck. It impressed the manager and he gave me an opportunity.
Worked up to CIO and now, at the tail end of my career, I code in C#, SQL, and batch jobs. Full circle.
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
