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When I was about 10, my father gave an AP course in FORTRAN for high-school students at the local University. He took me along a couple of times, and I was hooked.
This was about the year 6 BT (Before Terminals). God only knows how many punched cards I ruined before I got a program that would compile. 
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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Was gainfully employed as a chemist and was exploring a new Inductively Coupled Argon Plasma Spectrometer we had just bought. Could not find any analysis tools for the PDP-11 running the dang thing, so I learned PDP-11 assembly and wrote my own. Then did the same for a Gas Chromatograph we were using for oilfield gas analysis.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, navigate a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects! - Lazarus Long
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what a way to get started. into the fire as it were.
I almost bought a crusty old PDP-11 but i didn't know where i'd keep it.
These days, i could probably emulate one on a phone. 
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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Quote: what a way to get started. into the fire as it were.
Yep. Bear in mind that the argon plasma was created by passing argon gas through a coil of water cooled copper tubing energized by a 5KW RF generator. Never set anything on fire, but the generator frequency was very close to the middle of the CB Radio bands. If we ever forgot to close the faraday cage, we blew up every CB radio in town.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, navigate a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects! - Lazarus Long
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stoneyowl2 wrote: If we ever forgot to close the faraday cage, we blew up every CB radio in town.
That sounds like fun. =)
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 sucked rocks as an elementary school teacher. Was married and needed a new career. Luckily, programming and I were a good fit.
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I got to do some C programming in my first calculus class in college and found out that I enjoyed it. I picked up more programming skills on my own then decided to take some programming classes. Fun times 
Just because the code works, it doesn't mean that it is good code.
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Ah, 'twas the year 1983, and I decided to find out what all the hoo-rah was about.
I had seen a classmate's BASIC code a few year's earlier and the idea that a few arcane incantations could actually tell a machine to do something interesting was totally baffling.
But, once I was introduced to it and tried it, I found that I could do it like nobody's business.
(BASIC-Plus on a PDP-11 running RSTS-E)
Money for nothing, and the chicks for free.
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neat! and '83 keeps coming up. funny, that. 
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 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;
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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.
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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;
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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.
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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;
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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
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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
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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.
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'puzzle solving' and curiosity how to achieve something (align objects on screen, draw colors, calculate results of expressions...).
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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.
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naaah, just pretending 
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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