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I kept my first slide rule for many years but never did learn how to use it.
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!
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I know that if I start googling, I'll lose the whole day to it, so it's going back in the box.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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It's so easy to get distracted...smart move.
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!
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I still remember how to use one, but other than demonstrations for my children, I haven't used one in decades. 
Ah, for the wonderful good old days, when all we had were stone knives and bear skins...
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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I have a slide rule from my late father, along with a circular slide rule and a slide rule tie clasp (that actually works if you can read it).
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Besinger wrote: a slide rule tie clasp (that actually works if you can read it).
WANT!!!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Too much sentimental value, I used in in my Trig class in high school, you know, before they came out with scientific calculators. Yes, I'm that old. Some auction sites have them fairly cheep.
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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 f***ing 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.
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CDP1802 wrote: TRS-80 (Model I)
My first computer was one of these. I wrote a game for it and got my then girlfriend to type it into the computer.
Aaaah fond memories (the girl friend, not the compter)
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In 8th grade (around 13, maybe?) took a computer programming class in QBasic. The functional programming style coupled with solving problems got me hooked. I took Algebra for the first time in my life that same semester. It was life changing.
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In 1982 there has been an event in my city where they exposed some micro-computers from the era (mostly Thomson's MO5 and TO7), along with various Basic programs suitable for fourth-graders.
That changed my life. I asked for a computer soon after that and got a TI99-4A along with its Extended-Basic cartridge and a couple of games.
The virus was in.
You always obtain more by being rather polite and armed than polite only.
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Reading these posts makes me realize just how old these people really are. The dates are all before I was even born!
I am a Millennial, and I played on a computer in 1997-1998. At that time, there was already the Internet, but I didn't use the Internet much, because it hogged the phone line. As a kid, I just thought that the computer was a cool machine to play games on. That computer became a part of my bedroom in middle school and high school in the 2000s, while my family got a new family computer. We are not the most computer-savvy people, but we do have basic computer skills, like using Microsoft Office suite applications to write papers, spreadsheets, and presentations. Dad may program in MATLAB for his scientific research projects, and he taught himself BASIC and JAVA and C++ just because he thought they were cool. Mom is becoming proficient in using applications everyday, but she says she has no interest in programming. It's not relevant to her job anyway.
My computer skills are just average. I mean, I just know what a typical non-programming user knows. I worked with HTML and CSS as a teenager to design a static webpage on a virtual petsite, but that didn't last long, because the virtual pet site disabled JavaScript and PHP. I think it's because the virtual petsite was written in JavaScript and PHP, and the webmasters were afraid that users would hack into their computers. So, I moved to FreeWebs and designed little widgets (I think that's what they're called?) with just HTML and CSS. In 2011, I experimented with Excel to create a simple database and then a relational database and then tinkered with Excel macros and the Visual Basic for Applications language. Making the forms was fun, even though none of my college classes required any computer programming skills.
This summer is the summer that I would teach myself C++. I hope to use this skill to create an application that will aid in studying. I may publish the software as free, open-source software. I also want to learn web-based programming languages, so that I become more computer-literate and know what it is going on instead of relying on IT people.
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Someone told me along time ago, that I would get rich and famous if I got into programming; so far, I am neither. 
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How rich did you expect? The median salary for computer programmers seems to be around middle class.
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I did it for the nookie.
Jeremy Falcon
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Can you explain what "nookie" means? I see the dictionary definition, but I think it is the wrong definition. It does not seem to fit in this context.
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Urban dictionary is your friend.
Jeremy Falcon
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Eh? What does sex ("nookie") have to do with programming? 
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It's called irony: Google[^]
Peter Wasser
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
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Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: I did it for the nookie.
So you can take that cookie
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Ain't no rest for the wicked.
Jeremy Falcon
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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). Always hated that abbreviation. 16K RAM. Still saving programs on a tape recorder and cassette tapes. But it was good and you could do a good deal on it in addition to playing games. Display was on a COLOR TV. Whoo-HOO! Then I got a 5.25" floppy disk drive, a dot matrix printer, a word processing program, and a modem. In HS, I did my first pro-level work at 17 for our band program: a program to manage data about our band program's sheet music library. Yes, band geek here.
I went through high school and half of college with that same setup. With a word processing program for my Color Computer, I was able to do all my term papers, assignments, etc. Modem allowed me to remotely connect to systems at college for my programming class work.
Then in my first year of college, I got my first experience with the C language and a Digital Equipment Corp VAX machine.
I also started working for Radio Shack in the evenings after school. It was a good college job. Above all they taught you how to sell. I still use those skills today. Worked there for 3.5 years. One of the sales contests I won was a 50% discount on anything in the store up to a certain dollar amount. So I bought my first PC-clone: a Tandy 1000 TL, 286 machine. Continued learning, using, and programming on that to finish up my undergrad college days. Then I was recruited by Andersen Consulting (Accenture today) for my first permanent corporate position.
That's how I started in programming/development. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! 
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I was an electronics kid. I could solder and knew my components from making fuzz boxes and stuff for my guitar. This got me in the door in the 80s in So. Cal where Reagan was king and electronics was on fire.
Eventually I found myself as a test tech in a the DEC VAR market where there were people I got to know who wrote c for terminal programs and assembly for bit slice boards we sold. I got pretty close to cc vi and the wide pipelined AM2901 listings working in engineering.
I managed to get my paws on an LSI-11/23 (PDP 11/23 clone) for home with a 30mb hd and cc and vi and the K&R book when I was about 23.
When the PC Clones from Taiwan started showing up in cubicles we all had to have one. And of course a c compiler was in order for me as I knew some z80 assy and some i8031 too and c was a hit with me. I forget what compiler that was but I got Borland C++ shortly after that from EggHead.
It was all about surfin BBS systems in that day also.
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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 + b
that 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
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