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I started as an Electrical Engineering major with an interest in radio frequency. In my freshman year, I met the computer center — the second floor of the college. It was an IBM 360/50 with a few tape drives and 399 MB disk drives. I loved programming.
Later, I met a PDP-8i and a LINC-12 and was hooked. I still am, after 50 years. Now, my "stupid phone" has more computing power and more storage space than the whole second floor of the college!!
Progress.....
__________________
Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now.
© 2009, Rex Hammock
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Very similar!
Except it was a CDC 3200, no such thing as disk drives (in 1966, my freshman year), punched cards & 11" x 15" printouts (many hours later).
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I was introduced to Visual Basic by a friend in the early 90's. Then was taught by a great high school teacher in '98. Went off it for a couple of years though while I finished my HSC then self taught C then off to Uni. Rest is history.
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I was flailing around in my 20s, working menial jobs and pretty much on the road to nowhere. My mom was going to a local community college at night, so I decided to ride with her and maybe take a course in electronics. I couldn't afford a car even, so I had to ride with her and wait for her to get back home.
I wandered into the computer lab one day while waiting for her (she was taking a computer course.) Back then it was DOS on a floppy so no one cared if you sat down and started playing around. There was no such thing as a virus back then or a local network, you just rebooted on your own floppy and that was it.
I started playing around and really got the bug. By this time the IBM PC clones had just started arriving and making it much more reasonable to buy one. I sold one of my guitars and bought a Leading Edge (I think it was) with like 256K and TWO floppies, not just one. Back then having 256K and two floppies was something you might put on a t-shirt to brag about.
I got the IBM BIOS kit and MS/Intel assembler and started digging into assembly language. And I think it was mostly Turbo Pascal or maybe Turbo C at the time, can't remember.
Within a year I think I got a job at a GE Govt Systems place doing backups and PC maintenance at night and they had much better PCs and other languages so I spent my time waiting on backups learning even more. A couple years of that and I got a job as a developer in industrial automation, in 1988 I think it was.
And I've been doing it pretty much all day every day since then.
Explorans limites defectum
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The small computer "Sinclair ZX Spectrum+" brought me into programming. I loved it and slowly got into more and more programming work. Ultimately my lively-hood is software development for last 24 years.
And I am happy about it...  
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ZX Spectrum. Tiny, black, rubber keys... oh yes - I know this little gem 
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1972 I was using APL to construct practice code books used by (well, probably shouldn't say) - found that the existing program didn't quite do enough so learned APL - almost 50 years later, I couldn't write a line of APL to save my soul but I've been programming almost everything else.
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Gee... On what kind of computer were you using APL in 1972?
I learned APL myself in 1976 on an IBM 5100 "portable" (or "luggable") PC, but at that time the 5100 was brand new, more or less a marketing stunt for APL with a fully APLized keyboard and that kind of stuff.
I know APL had been available on huge IBM mainframes a few years earlier, but I was assuming that it then was run from a plain ASCII terminal (or... EBCDIC, we are talking IBM!). Was there a code page with the APL symbols in those days? Or did you program it with some sort of trigraphs for the APL symbols?
I have tried writing APL with trigraphs - forget it! That is one way that your fascination for APL is certain to be killed in a week or two!
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Okay, so I'm not on here much. I was using APL on a Quad IBM 360 at what we referred to as "The Funny Farm" at Ft Meade MD. And, no the 360 wasn't released to the public yet at that point, one of the "benefits" of "working" for the US military.
You're stretching my memory but it was run from paper tape (as was almost anything we did then.) When we edited it we got a printout and struggled with correcting it!
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Due to my study as computer scientist.
I wanted to become a professional programmer - was a great wish since I was a child. 
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He gave a programming course for high-school students using the Weizmann Institute's mainframe (an IBM OS/360, if memory serves), and took me along.
We programmed in FORTRAN using punched cards, and true to form - my first program had a bug in it! 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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my first program had a bug in it
A true developer !!
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Not exactly a coincidence but... my last program that I finished writing yesterday also had a bug in it. 
Amit Joshi
Value of the value is valued only if its value is valued.
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I saw the bouncing ball demo on an Amiga 500 and was intrigued. I worked with a ginormous book on CanDo. Then my teenage years hit and I forgot all about programming until I built a functioning 286 from pieces of 4 busted 286 computers. Then I tried to get 386 applications to run on my 286 (I found a math coprocessor which opened the world at that time) and was mostly successful. A few years later I had my BS in Information Systems with a concentration in Development, and the rest is history.
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A could solder as a teen so being only a guitarist in a garage band that could solder but not afford commercial effects pedals, using books I made my own. This made me useful to companies in So. Cal in the 70s and got on with them first as a junior analog tech then hopped from job to job chasing the money and found myself in CAD/CAM where there was firmware in thar boards. I got to know the coders and it looked like neat discipline. Someone gave me the K&R book and away I went on my own time for fun and profit.
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...to pay for college education parties, cool threads and concert tickets.
While I was working there I learned much more about FORTRAN (which I had initially learned in high school, one of the first five high schools in the country to teach about computers, not just programming - we started with an assembler, sending prepared punch tapes over a teletype to a University in Manchester. When we did FORTRAN we used coding sheets sent in the mail, getting compiler errors or results back a few days later) as I started writing programs for games and also for the Astronomy department.
I was actually studying for a Law degree at the time.
P.S. There was no such thing as an IBM PC at the time. Mainframes (and mini-mainframe computers) were IT!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Got a Radio Shack Color Computer for Christmas. Wrote my first line of BASIC code and I was hooked.
Yeah, I know... BASIC... well you have to start somewhere. 
“The palest ink is better than the best memory.” - Chinese Proverb
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My senior year of high school included a computer science elective. The classroom had eight Tandy TRS-80 computers with cassette drives and monochrome monitors (1981). And I was hooked... 
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Same. Good 'ole Trash-80. Spent many hours poring over computer magazines typing in demo code and saving on those awful cassette tapes and then made my own rocket game. It was simple but cool to me. got me hooked and went to college (NE U.S.) for CS degree. That was over 30 years ago! My how time flies when you're slinging code!
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Beat you, I got an HP33 programmable calculator for Christmas 1979 
Never stopped coding since then.
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We got Commodore 2032 at school - around 1979 - and I started to code a card game. It really worked and sometimes it beat me because it remembered all remaining cards 
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When did I get my HP41, and bought a book about "Synthetic HP41 programming" showing tricks that was really like self-modifying code to get access to functions that were never officially documented and had no public API (as we call it today)?
I believe it was on the HP41 that users were complaining: Why did you drop the factorial function? Of course we know it is available in the math plugin (which was a physical plugin in those days!), but compared to the older computer models, it is slow as molasses! ... To which HP answered: Oh sure, the calculator can do factorials, but we had more important uses for that button, so we couldn't give you access to it ... But through this "synthetic programming" methods, you could get programmatic access to it.
Disclaimer: I might be mixing up HP models here; maybe that wasn't on the HP41 but on another HP model, but with similar synthetic programming capabilities.
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I was working as a mailing machine repair tech and was getting tired of being bounced around on factory floors and getting covered in ink. There had to be a better way to make a living, so with my entire Christmas bonus I bought a Commodore 64, a 1541 disk drive and a 1526 printer. I didn't have enough money for a monitor, so I picked up an old BW TV at a second hand store. The only software I bought was EasyScript. I was going to write the Great American Novel.
I think I got chapter one done of some space opera thing when I discovered Compute! Magazine and VIDEO GAMES. These were the kind you typed in using something called BASIC, which seemed to consist of a bunch of READ, DATA and POKE statements. My favorite was called 'Baghdad' - you had to navigate a faux Islamic city as the green genie on your flying carpet and avoid getting knocked by the white genies the computer threw up. The higher the level, the more white genies to avoid, until the fifth level, when the Purple Genie appeared. He flew higher and faster than you could, and I couldn't get past him no matter what I did.
So, not taking defeat so easily I resolved to cheat. I asked a friend who worked at Naval Avionics and was more familiar with computers than I how to go about this. He suggested disassembly - OK, I said, I have a screwdriver and a soldering iron, now what? No, he explained, you need to disassemble the CODE.
I bought the Commodore 64 Assember/Disassember for $19.95 at my local K-Mart. And proceeded to teach myself 6510 assembler in order to defeat the dreaded Purple Genie. I was successful, and his altitude was reduced.
The rest, as they say, is history ...
Dave H.
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As per my 'bio', started life as a genuine for-real research chemist - and that had computer exposure (IBM w/punch-cards->MassComp->PC). All self taught, except for the a FORTRAN intro for the IBM.
Playing with it was just so comfortable - like darkroom work - time just disappeared as that "OK - just one more try - I got it" took over.
Fast-Forward: Instrument automation. Then Monte-carlo modeling of surface phenomena (nearest neighbor interactions) and even what would now be called fuzzy logic (except done by hand) to use a few datapoints to predict/guide experiments/results. Even caught Marcel-Dekker's attention.
All the forgoing just for the fun of it. Now (actually ca. 25+ yrs), as stated in the 'bio', I do for money what I used to do for pleasure - just like a hooker. Go figure.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I started as self taught, which was good but also awful. I was also very young and with 0 instruments (no Internet, no other people working in IT) so that wasn't half bad.
Then I focused on IT schools, starting from high school (Technical Tigh School, to the horror of my teachers who wanted me to go to a "nobler" high school, which to me means a useless waste of time). I then went on to Computer Engineering.
What got me into it? Curiosity and self-teaching. Where did I learn? From school onwards.
GCS d--(d+) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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