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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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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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