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my mentor was Chuck Norris
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
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I had the old PCjr with cartridge BASIC to cut my teeth on. I remember being so very impressed with being able to program music with "Play" commands.
At school, we had either Apple IIs (with the cassette tapes) or Radio Shack TRS-80s.
Who else remembers having to wait a half hour for Lemonade Stand to load?
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Christian Mattix
Force 5
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By my 8th anniversary (1985) I got my Timex 2048.
It was awesome and I loved the games but the last page of the manual and the nice little words on the keyboard started to intrigue me.
I'm Portuguese and here we didn't had access to much computer information, at least not for me at that time, so my only resource was that last page of the manual and a family friend that gave me some pieces of code copied from somewhere.
Anyway, it was awesome.
Between playing Bombjack, RickDangerous, Chuckie Egg, Target Renegade, ... I wrote several games for my own joy!
I can't get enough of the word AWESOME here 
After that Timex I had a Sinclair 128kb +3 (the one with some nice floppy disks that hadn't much use), a Commodore Amiga, and then the PC's and consoles took over.
Despite the incomparable quality improvement of the tech we have available today I can't get close to the awesomeness I felt those days.
Playing the cutting edge GT5 or GoW on PS3 can't please me anywhere close the way Bombjack did 25 years ago.
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Programmed game where you enter direction and elevation of gun, program returned distance to target or success. Target then advanced on gun emplacement and the process began again. If the target overran gun placement you lost.
All this is 49 steps. Learnt all about program size optamizations!
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ZX81 for me 
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...was when I got to Uni to study Maths and Computer Science. It was an ICL 1900 with George III as the OS, and the closest you physically got to the computer was about 100 feet.
All input was by punched cards, All output by fanfold paper.
Punching was a nightmare: six punch stations for around 500 students. Normally, one of these would have a working printer to print the card content on it: all the others just made the holes. Frequently, cards would jam, and it could take 24 hours for a station to be repaired. You got good at hand punching them, and reading cards just from the holes. In theory, you could hand write your software on coding sheets and they would be punched by "The Girls", but since this added another layer of error and took several days we very rarely did this.
To make life more awkward, the operators frequently dropped card decks and shoved them through however they were when they were picked up. So if you suddenly found a batch of FORTRAN in the middle of your COBOL program, tough.
There was also a run count, which was passed to the lecturers and used as part of the grading system for submitted work. Low run count == higher grade.
It's a miracle I managed to learn anything in the first year: until my industrial placement, when I went to Rutherford Labs and could actually type into a VDT and physically had access to the computer room.
Bearing in mind that an ICL 1900 is now eclipsed for processing power by my watch, you young 'uns don't know you is borned!
<rant>I died in two world wars for the likes of you! Bring back National Insurance, that's what I say! Couple of years in a Building Society, do you a world of good...</rant>
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together.
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I did Logo from 2-4th grade. This was followed with 4 years of basic then 2 years of pascal.
When I was in college they tought me Fortran.
Then when i did my masters I learnt a bunch of things from C, C++, Java and so on...
I miss coding in Basic
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gaurav_verma_mca wrote: I miss coding in Basic
So? You can download an old compiler and have at it.
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Yes I can but dose the guy who makes snowcones make snow man in his free time
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Compiled Basic? Luxury!
A BBC Basic interpreter is all anyone needs. 
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I haven't seen a BASIC interpreter for many years.
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In our Math/Informatics class, we also used Logo (but at that time, I already spoke C++). It was quite funny, actually. Especially since our teacher was a total douchebag.
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Logo is much better it uses FP
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... I started messing around with a trash 80 color my parents got as a gift I was 7 or 8. It's "OS" was the same Tandy Basic it was programmed with, blurring the line between the two heavily; and if the included manuals made a strict split between the parts that a normal user was supposed to read, and what only hard core geeks were supposed to care about, I didn't pick up on it at the time. At the time I never really went beyond for loops to create psuedo ascii art using block characters. I know I didn't grasp most of the advanced material; eg I remember after reading stuff like "Returns 0 if both parameters are 0, 1 otherwise" wondering WTH I could possibly use it for, or more generally WTH was boolean algebra in the first place. My initial forays with quick basic on the dos 6.0/486-25 computer bought around my 12th birthday never went much farther.
When I was 15 I registered for my HS's intro to programming class (turbo pascal). I went into the course with a massively swollen head, convinced that because I was "good with computers" and in the gifted program I should be able to coast to an easy A. It didn't help that the first few weeks of the class were almost as much of a joke as I was taking it as. Inevitably I crashed and burned.  It wasn't until about 6 or 7 weeks into the 9 week grading period that it really became apparent to me that I had gotten in over my head. Shortly after I realized I was in trouble my teacher/guidance councilor scheduled a meeting and because at that point it was too late to drop the course both recommended I just give up, take my F for the course, and use the remainder of the class as a study hall. If I really wanted (they didn't recommend it) I could register again next year and try again. Their opinion was that because each lesson built on the prior it would be impossible for me to recover because I couldn't understand the current lesson without the material I failed to learn previously. Both of them underestimated my stubbornness and missed that half the reason my written assignments scores were so bad was not that I was totally clueless (50 or 60% would be about right); but that my usual sloppyness was working against me when I didn't have compile errors to catch stupid errors. I managed to (if only just) get a passing grade for the quarter and finished out with A's by the end of the year. Towards the end of the year my teacher told me that in the 20ish years she'd been teaching the programming class that of the dozens of students who catastrophically screwed up at the start I was the only one who managed to recover and finish out with a passing grade. I never looked back from then. 
3x12=36
2x12=24
1x12=12
0x12=18
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My first computer was afore the afore-mentioned ZX81. A ZX80, in fact.
I had been coding before then using that good old standby pencil and paper, which I had to invent especially for the purpose because the chisel and rocks that the others used were too heavy for me.
Henry Minute
Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain
Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?"
“I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus!
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Did you have to stop when the bright thing in the sky disappeared, or did you guys have that bright-ouchy thing known as fire?
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Oddly enough I had a bit part in this[^] which appeared shortly after I got my first computer. I appear at about 28 seconds.
Henry Minute
Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain
Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?"
“I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus!
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Hardly recognized you there. I really need the soundtrack to that movie.
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I was 14 when my brother actually bought a little 8-bit Atari 600XL computer. Started on that, and then "upgraded" to a Atari 130XE with of all amazing things, a tape-drive for storage. Boy, do I wish I had kept those. They would be fun to look at once in a while.
I wasn't, now I am, then I won't be anymore.
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It was a few years later before I got my hands on a box.
But I had my own computer long before then.
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Marcus Kramer wrote: Boy, do I wish I had kept those
Take a look on ebay. I often get a surge of nostalga and would secretly like to start my own private collection of stuff from the 8 bit days, but be warned, things are nowhere near as good as you remember them. Tape-drive, wait five minutes for 20KB to load only to find the volume was bit too loud and you get some aggresive error message.
Regards,
Rob Philpott.
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With out degree, after finished a Diploma I came to my first job & that day all other people looked & smiled at me at the same time like in the movie Almost famous (because I was too young at that time[Even now, you can see me in my profile]). clickety[^](From 2:00 to 2:45).
I still remember their words from the past. "Hey check in that page kid", "Hey kid, don't be over smart", "Take care kid", "Never do that way...oops you right", etc.,  *Happiness* They have helped me a lot.
... I'm missing them..they are all in different location/countries by jobs. 
Will meet them soon in this year. 
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Life is changing, school, habits, social networking, I think that in ten years the new era of programmers will change this results drastically. I would like to see the same question in 10 years 
btw, I began with QBasic
luisnike19
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