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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!
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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.
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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.
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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
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**** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 ****
64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE
READY.
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
RUN■
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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I was in the infantry stationed in Italy when the PX (Post Exchange) started selling PC's. I bought a Tandy 286 with dual floppies and took it home. Now what? I found it had gwbasic on the disk. I started 'playing' with it to see what I could do and was hooked from then on.
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Ooh a 286. I remember my first one. 
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.
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hacker movies from the 80's and finding that Basic programming pamphlet in the Apple IIe keyboarding lab in Jr. High.
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Very familiar. Sneakers was great. A classic
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.
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heh
*sideeyes you* 
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.
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In 1991 I was 13 and my father brought home our first IBM Compatible, a 286 machine with 4mb of RAM (maybe 8), and showed me how to write batch files to launch programs so I didn't have to do it from scratch every time.
I was intrigued, took a pascal class in 1995 in high school, but still stuck to mechanical engineering in college until my second semester when I was introduced to C++ and Calculus II and thermal dynamics.
I said "forget it" to the crazy math and found my way to C++ (I was nudged, my C++ professor was Chuck Allison of the C++ Standards Committee back then).
- Freedom is the right of all sentient beings. (Optimus Prime, or Michael Bay, but I prefer Otpimus Prime)
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cool. C++ is still my favorite. But it's a lot more laborious than C# to get right. It's super elegant though, and the only really multi paradigm language out there. I love that you can do DSL style programming with it.
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.
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Not to mention, Template Meta Programming (a little nugget from back in the day).
My father always wanted to write a program to manage sporting tournaments because he felt they were poorly run (I wrestled for 15 years as a child). Said he would do it but didn't know C++ (He was in process engineering). First I'd heard of it as a kid, kind of stuck with me.
Definitely my favorite as well.
- Freedom is the right of all sentient beings. (Optimus Prime, or Michael Bay, but I prefer Otpimus Prime)
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When I was 12 we got a commodore Vic 20. I started programming in it's native BASIC language, I typed in machine code from magazines, never did get a handle on it's symbolic language. Funny enough, I started out making games and ended up continuing to make games after everything in between.
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i remember typing in machine code from those old mags. I ended up learning 6502 bytecode with those things. I used to have my friend read them off to me while I'd type them in and vice versa so we'd get it right. It was a whole lot easier than trying to go back and forth and remembering where you were.
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.
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Part 1 - Obligation
3rd year of college (Electrical Engineering) 1978 brought two assignments:
1) Make the electro-mechanical guts of an adding machine print "1234567890" using wires, solder, and a Motorola 6800.
2) Full year thesis project. I saw an article in Byte magazine analyzing how the crew of the Enterprise (ST:TOS) interacted with the ship's computer. That got me thinking seriously about voice recognition. So I designed a set of 4 audio band pass filters and counted zero crossings in each band. I interfaced that with a PDP-12 Laboratory Instrumentation Computer and wrote the code that ran on the DIAL operating system. It had a paper tape reader to load, but it also had two small magnetic tape drives.
Part 2 - Curiosity
After that, having been hired by "I've Been Moved" in 1979, I wrote a program to help the hardware service reps submit JCL to MVS for obtaining targeted and summary hardware diagnostic data.
Finally, in 1985, when I was an instructor at the Ed Centre, I created an interactive questionnaire facility (IQF) that ran on VM to create and administer quizes as well as instructor and course evaluations to the students.
Part 3 - Love
Creating IQF really caused me a lot of personal angst. While writing it, I fell in love with programming. I mean hard. I was doing it in my head at the Christmas dinner table. I couldn't stop. Yet I was I was part of an Accelerated Development Program that had me moved from department to department and firmly headed to management. The further I got away from programming the more angst I felt.
In spring 1987 I took the plunge and began making my living doing VAX and embedded programming for a fire alarm manufacturer's Engineering department.
The rest is history.
Thanks for the inspiration to take this trip down memory lane and get in touch again with the spark that ignited the flame.
Cheers,
Mike Fidler
"I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright
"I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright
"I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter." Steven Wright yet again.
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Wow I wonder how many VAX programmers are here? Can't be many, I'd imagine. How cool! VAX/VMS inspired some of NT - it's a real piece of history. I usually mean that facetiously when it comes to computers, but here I'm being sincere.
Neat!
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.
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I'm originally from Massachusetts, so all my education (1983 - 1992) and early career (1989 - 2002) was on DEC systems.
I'm now "just" an OpenVMS hobbyist... with four systems at home. MicroVAX, Alpha (2), and Itanium.
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They all run VMS? it's kind of a weird OS these days, with everything either (quasi)POSIX or windows usually
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.
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Yes, all running OpenVMS to keep (me) from getting too rusty.
I installed VAX BASIC on the MicroVAX because it has immediate mode -- like the PDP-11 I started on.
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