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Similar story here. I majored in computer tech, learning about the hardware, but it required a couple of programming classes, and I fell in love with it.
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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In 1969 I joined the Navy and I was supposed to be an air traffic controller (according to the recruiter). In Boot camp the aptitude test they give you showed I scored very high in both Math and Mechanical skills. They told me I was going to be a computer tech in an air wing, and sent me to computer school in Memphis.
I then joined an A6 squadron as a weapons system specialist, the heart of said system, being a digital computer. When I left the Navy in 1973, I got married, and went back to college and then on to law school. I needed to support my family and had to work as well.
With a computer skill on my resume', I went from one IT position to another. Having taken a 3 hour course in basic in college, I was gradually asked to start writing programs for various employers. My first program was a payroll app in Apple basic.
From there I moved to a RadioShack TRS80 and Bill gates had just released Dos and GW-Basic. (The "GW" standing for "Gates, William")
Having graduated from Law school and passed the Bar, I was working as a lawyer and had a small software business for PC's on the side which kept growing.
Finding out that being a lawyer really sucks, I left the law firm I was working at and went at my company full time. I have made a good living at it ever since.
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Back in 1980 my dad (high school chemistry teacher) brought home a Sinclair ZX80. Being 13 years old, I became fascinated by it and soon self-taught on assembly language to create a program to compute grade point averages for his students. The rest, as they say, was history.
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Same here, although it was a TRS-80 
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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Same, except it was 1984 and my dad brought home Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48kb RAM. Best machine I ever owned...
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My father was a Programmer -> Sr Sys Analyst for a big earthmoving co. I grew up seeing yellow cards, green bar, flowchart templates. I got to see a massive card sorter as a kid, and go into the glass palace. But did NOT want to do anything like that - ya right.
BASIC in high school - keypunch on cards, teacher took to the local community college and receive your output 3+ days later.
Picked up an Apple 2 EuroPlus whilst stationed in W.Germany. Pascal gave me a taste of a structured language.
Learned COBOL at the community college, went to work.
Now working as an application administrator - so not much programming.
Currently scripting with Eggplant for application testing.
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Injured at work as a heavy equipment operator. Management put me in front of a computer hoping I would quit. I realized I was good at it and used my three years of disability to go to school. Thought I would go into networking or hardware support but my first job was programming.
Gifford T Nicholson
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Working in QA, 1969, was sent to Field Engineer School (in house) for the OCR Page Reader System. System was controlled by Varian Associate 620i 16 bit mini-computer. We were going to be taught the circuitry in the computer, but instructors decided to start with the assembly language lesson before the circuitry. That way the instruction affect could be followed through the circuitry. Later had formal training in assembly, Fortran-B, Basic, and others.
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Quote: My studies at school were had IT as a component but I chose programming
You've got an extra additional word here.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I have a B.S. degree in computer engineering. The curriculum struck a balance between hardware and software. Students could concentrate in one area or another based on their preference. For me, I have spent the majority of my career writing software for process control and data acquisition applications in real-time and near real-time environments.
None of my academic work related to "IT". Even my operating systems course was more in terms of implementation than in management. The implication in the survey is that academic training concentrates on IT. If that's the case now, no wonder Q&A is full of "gimme the codez" posts.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Wow, I hope that's not the case. I went to a major research university where all my professors had PHDs and were heavily involved in CS research. So I had a LOT of theory in my schooling which was hard to transition out of when I got my first programming job. Most of my programming knowledge came from self study even though I was in a CS degree program at a university 
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I worked part-time as a programmer through most of my college education. The work complemented the classes. In class I learned basic principles, algorithms, and techniques. At work I learned practical skills. It was to my advantage that Wright State University[^] is right next door (literally) to Wright-Patterson Air Force base[^], which has a large role in Air Force R&D. A lot of my instructors were adjunct professors whose day jobs were as engineers at WPAFB.
Software Zen: delete this;
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see subject.
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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I was (and still am) a gamer and so wanted to learn how to create my first computer game.
So I thought I originally needed to learn how to develop software, and to get rolling I took a Q-Basic course I'm high school.
Then I found out a hell of a lot goes into making games, like having a skill in artistry of which I had zero skill or talent for.
I did however have a blast developing line of business applications and solving logic problems.
And here I am now still enjoying doing that some 20 years later. 
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I was studying Chemistry -- nothing to do with Programming. Then, I seen an IT training institute against my college. Just to cut the time one day, I (with my friends) went there to know about the courses and fees. Then, I wanted to completely forget about it - just continue Chemistry.
But, the Marketing guy there was tough; he kept calling. Just to throw some reason, I said the fees is huge and I cannot pay. He offered installments and I decided to join.
That completely changed my career line.
Amit Joshi
Value of the value is valued only if its value is valued.
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It would be wrong to say my studies were "focused" on IT; however my maths teacher spent a lesson (in 1969) illustrating how precise computer code had to be, by attempting to navigate from one side of the room to another in response to JUST the commands "turn left" and "forward one step". Then he introduced us to Elliot 903 machine code, as a way of teaching us about multiplication and division. That was it as far as formal lessons were involved. But he then got us an account at a University a few hundred miles away, and a group of us started punching cards and sending them off in the post. They'd come back with punch errors and syntax errors but after a term, we'd finally written a program to multiply two numbers. Then we acquired a teletype and a dial-up modem and got access to Basic. Within a couple of years I'd developed (in my lunch hours and after school) a Cobol interpreter written in Basic.
At Uni, there was a module on Fortran which I took, then got a summer internship at the Railway Technical Centre in Derby, using Fortran to simulate train performance and do energy modelling. On graduation I got a job as a "data processing graduate trainee" and two years later I was a Senior Programmer leading a team of 15.
Next year I'll be able to say I've been coding in 7 different decades, even though I'll only be 61!
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3 and 5 sound very similar.
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while I studied (physical) Geography,
it was mandatory to have courses in Statistics and Programming (Algol 60!). It was the time of the first PET machines where some colleagues used a flatbed plotter drawing thematic maps.
Being a math aficionado, I focused on data processing in the beautiful world of punched cards, UNIVAC 1108, Fortran, SPSS and the starting of CODASYL databases.
My first commercial job was COBOL, IBM /36 and I haven't left this realm.
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Left school, got a job, bought an Amiga 500 to play games on.
Enjoyed programming more than playing games.
Went to college to do a computing degree despite having never done an IT/Computing lesson at school.
26 years later and I'm still programming, still wondering what I am going to do when I grow up?
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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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