Counter-Strike. I learned basic HTML for a clan web page, then PHP to run the forums.
I eventually wanted to host my own server, so I learned Linux back then too. Probably 25 years ago.
I loved playing computer games when I was young, and in school, they were also teaching us HTML to make cool webpages. I was naturally curious so I started learning things on my own by reading computer books.
In parallel I loved gaming so much I wanted to make my own games. I started making small stuff on flash after reading online and learned a little bit of ActionScript.
That made me realize that coding is really hard to learn on my own (for my dumb brain) so I thought to check my local computer institutes for basic courses. Found a small coaching center. Instead of coding, they convinced me that I needed to learn hardware first and impressed a teenage kid by showing simple tricks like breaking windows password, upgrading hardware, etc.
So I did that course for 6 months and to my surprise I enjoyed it as well and learned a lot on my own too. Finally, I started building computers for a living and started a small home-computer repair venture with my friend (during college).
Building an S-100 system from kits. Soldering all of the edge connectors to the IMSAI motherboard taught me to solder and the power supply taught me to mistrust big electrolytic caps.
For me is was work. First DOS, then Win 3. Years later, when the CEO of the company I worked for arranged for a really good Dell computer discount with financing, many of my co-workers purchased them, mostly for their kids. Many of those kids broke these machines (Most of them had Win ME) and I became the IT guy. I already had a PC for several years, which I broke a few times and had to gather info to make repairs, so I was glad to help and learned a ton of new things about computers. A shout out to Maximum PC Magazine, who had a wealth of info every month. Sad to see it's gone.
I spent so much time typing in the Star Trek game from that book into a Commodore Pet, and then so much time playing the game. Hunt the Wumpus as well. Good times
getting a bench engineer job fixing PCs (286/ 386) made PCs in to a hobby. it's was always (90%) the capacitors,
I'd fix PC's then play around with them - i still remember how badly incompatible conner and seagate HDDs where, that tried to share the same IDE cable
I tinkered much like OP, and went on to do a professional trade course in PC building and maintenance when I was like fifteen. I also built websites. However, I didn't follow through and studied business management in college. It was only in my late 20's when I learned proper programming and developed a love for computer science with Harvard's CS50. I went on to do a masters in software engineering at Harvard Extension, and now I'm doing the OMSCS at Georgia Tech. Unlike OP it took me a while to connect with my love for computers. It's been a very haphazard journey!
Typing in listings from magazines for my 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Debugging them (there were almost always misprints or genuine coding mistakes) taught me a lot.
My Dad was a software developer in the UK with Honeywell in the 1960s and after a stint with Wang (yes, I know, ha ha) went independent. As a result we had a variety of Wang minis in the house in the mid-70s when I was a toddler, which must have been fairly unusual. I learnt to write on green-banded continuous stationery!
Thereafter it was the more conventional British route into computing via Clive Sinclair's cheap but, er, cheap, ZX81 for me... but those minis lit the fuse.
>As a result we had a variety of Wang minis in the house in the mid-70s when I was a toddler, which must have been fairly unusual.
Fred Wang, An Wang's son, had the most powerful computing device on campus in his dorm room at Brown University in 1968. He set up a schedule for classmates to use it for schoolwork.
Many years later one of my Dad's customers paid me and my college housemates £10 to take away a Wang MVP system with four chonky terminals from their London offices.
We drove it all the way to Wales and had it in our shared student house for the rest of that year. Fun times.
New that system would have been something like £40,000 in late 70s/early 80s money so that was a stark introduction to asset depreciation for us!
We did have fun with it, but sadly we left it for our landlord to deal with at the end of the year. Kind of a dick move in retrospect.
I think all of us had our own PCs that were individually more powerful than that system.
I thought my mom decided for reasons lost to me that I should have a computer, and bought one for me in 1982 or so, but according to her it was entirely my idea. No clue what prompted it. Perhaps reading science fiction.
I was obsessed with science fiction when I was a kid, and math and computers in particular. I saved up my pocket money to buy a TRS-80 Color Computer II, and learned to program in BASIC over the summer holidays. Later I learned 6809 Assembly, and Color Forth on the same machine.
In 6th grade i stole my teachers car to go get a girl some lemon heads...this was just the latest such incident so my teachers said I had to stand in the corner for the rest of the year; but my computer teacher Ms. Melton said I could spend the time in the computer lab and she started teaching me JS. Then on work study day she sent me to her friends at a local ISP and they gave me an internship etc... etc... 30 years later and I am a software eng.
I am 41, JS was released 29 years ago; 6th grade is 11—12 years old so my math might be a little off. But it was JS, I remember because it was new and i thought it was so cool to do alerts, LOL.
I started programming at the age of 10 on a commodore computer. Did not have any friends or family members in the field. A lot of hacking, experimentation, and continual improvement. I still take the same approach today.
I am a big believer that for many of us, curiosity, a desire to learn, and no fear of failure are key to learning. I happen to be work in the industry full time, however I apply the same skillset towards art, cooking, welding/fabrication. The ability to analyze and problem solve is really what it is about.
'Learn to learn' is the advice I give anyone entering the field, and oh yeah, drop the ego as that tends to hold you back from your potential; we are are continually learning...
When I was around 4, my dad, an aerospace engineer, passed down his old Windows 95 computer to us. I loved rummaging through C:\Windows and finding all the little "hidden" utilities, it was like a toybox. When I was around 6, he brought home a binder of programming lessons and a worn copy of "Sams' Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours" from work and started going through them with me. Eventually I moved on to reading every computer-related book I could get my hands on in the public library's small, very out-of-date collection.
I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten the early start that I did. I'd be a completely different person without that.
In middle school my parents got me a graphing calculator for Algebra. Couldn't figure out a damn thing about how to write programs on it, and I didn't really have much computer or internet access at home, but I was curious.
In the school computer lab I did some searching and found a programming guide for that model of calculator on some university website. While printing out my assignment I also secretly printed out the guide and hid it under the other papers (not supposed to be wasting ink on a personal print job). Took it home and was glued to it for months.
Eventually I was able to program the game Snake. It ran slow as hell, but it ran.
I was 9 when I first moved to the US. I couldn't speak English so the teacher stuck me in front of the classroom computer. It was one of those monochrome all-in-one console things that must have been from the 80's and the only thing on there was Q-basic. To pass the time I followed the tutorials to create my own MUD. And that's how I learned BASIC before English.
A bit of background: I grew up in Brazil between the years transitioning from full protectionism (import substitution) to a more freeing trade economy.
When I was around 9 I discovered that the videogame my dad had, a Gradiente Expert, could boot into some kind of BASIC REPL. The machine was a clone of the MSX re-branded in the Brazilian market to be allowed within the import substitution policy.
I had barely learnt to read but I got very, very excited seeing the command line pop-up. My dad worked in the telecom industry, and I had seen him many times working on a command line. I flipped through the manual and eventually figured out how to make the computer write characters on the screen.
From then on I spent years obsessed with learning how to program on the MSX, then on the 386 running MS-DOS at home, eventually Win95 appeared, and since my dad worked in telecom we were some of the first ones I knew to get an internet connection.
On the web I learnt HTML, CGI, then ASP, and later PHP. I think I was about 12-13 when I tried to learn C/C++ for modding games, some 3D modeling, etc., eventually culminating with me getting a job as an intern/youth apprentice scheme at 15-16 to help programming a factory's intranet systems to comply with ISO9001.
My dad never really pushed me to work with computers or anything, I think I was just a very curious kid who loved science, and also tinkering and building stuff. I realised only later in my 30s how it all connected, building with coding was probably immensely satisfying for me as a kid, very fast feedback on what works or not, many puzzles to solve, and virtually free of expenses that I couldn't afford.
Our math teacher in UK high school c.1976 asked us if anyone want to join him for an adult education programming class being taught by the local university (Durham), and a bunch of us did. This was batch mode (punched card) PL/1 programming - submit job to operator and an hour later get a fanfold printout of the result. A couple of us (incl. me) had parents that worked at the University, and got the computer dept. to agree to allow us high school kids to go in on weekends etc to use the Unix system (online access) there, after the initial adult education class had ended. We spent a lot of time there, taught ourselves to program in C, and caused some amount of trouble by messing with the unix system - brute force password cracking, and on one occasion accidentally deleting the /etc/passwd file, which luckily they had backed up - they were surprisingly tolerant of all this and didn't kick us out!
In March 1978 the first issue of "Personal Computer World" magazine came out, featuring the just released NASCOM-1 kit computer on the front cover. I'd just inherited 200 UKP from my grandmother, so sent it off and got myself a kit. This was a 1 MHz Z-80 system that came with 2 KB of memory (1KB for user, 1KB for system), and a built-in monitor program that let you enter programs as hex machine code. The computer itself came as bare board, bag of components to solder, and no case. It used a TV for display and cassette recorder for program/data storage. You'd hand assemble your program on paper, then enter the codes and run it. There wasn't a whole lot you could do in 1KB, but I remember coding things like a hangman game, and memorizing the op-codes well enough to program short things directly in hex.
I then went to college, taking Math & Comp Sci, graduating in 1982, and lucking into a dream job at Acorn Computers, which started my career as developer.
So lucky. My wife graduated in 2013 in computer science and the only computer she had access to was the computer in her university lab between the hours 13:00 to 15:00 on Thursdays and Fridays.
Using an HP 3000 at a local college via teletype terminal during summer gifted & talented program.
The school eventually got some TRS-80s, and I did a summer program where we passed an Apple ][ off as a robotics program, and I mowed grass summers and eventually bought a Commodore Vic-20 and later a TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1 (in retrospect, should have waited and gotten the Model 100).
Got Inman's book on Apple Machine Language, and a couple of other programming books, and lots of magazines (including one which had the ad "We See Farther" ad: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_11970... ) and typed in lots of program listings for games and so forth, and used Scripsit for my senior term paper.
Bought a 128K Mac and pretty much one of everything in the store, then switched to Windows 'cause I wanted a portable device, until the NCR-3125 and Go Corp.'s PenPoint came out --- paired that w/ a NeXT Cube which got me through college and was pretty much the high-water mark of my graphical computing experience.
73 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadI loved playing computer games when I was young, and in school, they were also teaching us HTML to make cool webpages. I was naturally curious so I started learning things on my own by reading computer books.
In parallel I loved gaming so much I wanted to make my own games. I started making small stuff on flash after reading online and learned a little bit of ActionScript.
That made me realize that coding is really hard to learn on my own (for my dumb brain) so I thought to check my local computer institutes for basic courses. Found a small coaching center. Instead of coding, they convinced me that I needed to learn hardware first and impressed a teenage kid by showing simple tricks like breaking windows password, upgrading hardware, etc.
So I did that course for 6 months and to my surprise I enjoyed it as well and learned a lot on my own too. Finally, I started building computers for a living and started a small home-computer repair venture with my friend (during college).
Eventually learned HTML to spruce up my profile.
Then discovered running a “mall” to earn Neopoints and so I handcrafted a banner in MS Paint and manually mapped pixels for turning it into a link map
Then had my neopoints stolen by a fake website, tried to recreate fake website for myself, leading to… CTFs, hacking & cybersecurity
> How breaking computers taught me to build them....
but it is
> Taught me to build them...
Walter Bright said here that he learned programming from this book.
I'd fix PC's then play around with them - i still remember how badly incompatible conner and seagate HDDs where, that tried to share the same IDE cable
Thereafter it was the more conventional British route into computing via Clive Sinclair's cheap but, er, cheap, ZX81 for me... but those minis lit the fuse.
Fred Wang, An Wang's son, had the most powerful computing device on campus in his dorm room at Brown University in 1968. He set up a schedule for classmates to use it for schoolwork.
We drove it all the way to Wales and had it in our shared student house for the rest of that year. Fun times.
New that system would have been something like £40,000 in late 70s/early 80s money so that was a stark introduction to asset depreciation for us!
We did have fun with it, but sadly we left it for our landlord to deal with at the end of the year. Kind of a dick move in retrospect.
I think all of us had our own PCs that were individually more powerful than that system.
Precisely zero influences on this from family.
config.sys and autoexec.bat?
It was the work laptop of my father. We were on holidays, far from home, so it was harder to fix it. Oops…!
Wait, what? Your 6th grade teacher was teaching you JS before it was even released?
I am a big believer that for many of us, curiosity, a desire to learn, and no fear of failure are key to learning. I happen to be work in the industry full time, however I apply the same skillset towards art, cooking, welding/fabrication. The ability to analyze and problem solve is really what it is about.
'Learn to learn' is the advice I give anyone entering the field, and oh yeah, drop the ego as that tends to hold you back from your potential; we are are continually learning...
I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten the early start that I did. I'd be a completely different person without that.
In the school computer lab I did some searching and found a programming guide for that model of calculator on some university website. While printing out my assignment I also secretly printed out the guide and hid it under the other papers (not supposed to be wasting ink on a personal print job). Took it home and was glued to it for months.
Eventually I was able to program the game Snake. It ran slow as hell, but it ran.
When I was around 9 I discovered that the videogame my dad had, a Gradiente Expert, could boot into some kind of BASIC REPL. The machine was a clone of the MSX re-branded in the Brazilian market to be allowed within the import substitution policy.
I had barely learnt to read but I got very, very excited seeing the command line pop-up. My dad worked in the telecom industry, and I had seen him many times working on a command line. I flipped through the manual and eventually figured out how to make the computer write characters on the screen.
From then on I spent years obsessed with learning how to program on the MSX, then on the 386 running MS-DOS at home, eventually Win95 appeared, and since my dad worked in telecom we were some of the first ones I knew to get an internet connection.
On the web I learnt HTML, CGI, then ASP, and later PHP. I think I was about 12-13 when I tried to learn C/C++ for modding games, some 3D modeling, etc., eventually culminating with me getting a job as an intern/youth apprentice scheme at 15-16 to help programming a factory's intranet systems to comply with ISO9001.
My dad never really pushed me to work with computers or anything, I think I was just a very curious kid who loved science, and also tinkering and building stuff. I realised only later in my 30s how it all connected, building with coding was probably immensely satisfying for me as a kid, very fast feedback on what works or not, many puzzles to solve, and virtually free of expenses that I couldn't afford.
In March 1978 the first issue of "Personal Computer World" magazine came out, featuring the just released NASCOM-1 kit computer on the front cover. I'd just inherited 200 UKP from my grandmother, so sent it off and got myself a kit. This was a 1 MHz Z-80 system that came with 2 KB of memory (1KB for user, 1KB for system), and a built-in monitor program that let you enter programs as hex machine code. The computer itself came as bare board, bag of components to solder, and no case. It used a TV for display and cassette recorder for program/data storage. You'd hand assemble your program on paper, then enter the codes and run it. There wasn't a whole lot you could do in 1KB, but I remember coding things like a hangman game, and memorizing the op-codes well enough to program short things directly in hex.
I then went to college, taking Math & Comp Sci, graduating in 1982, and lucking into a dream job at Acorn Computers, which started my career as developer.
The school eventually got some TRS-80s, and I did a summer program where we passed an Apple ][ off as a robotics program, and I mowed grass summers and eventually bought a Commodore Vic-20 and later a TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1 (in retrospect, should have waited and gotten the Model 100).
Got Inman's book on Apple Machine Language, and a couple of other programming books, and lots of magazines (including one which had the ad "We See Farther" ad: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_11970... ) and typed in lots of program listings for games and so forth, and used Scripsit for my senior term paper.
Bought a 128K Mac and pretty much one of everything in the store, then switched to Windows 'cause I wanted a portable device, until the NCR-3125 and Go Corp.'s PenPoint came out --- paired that w/ a NeXT Cube which got me through college and was pretty much the high-water mark of my graphical computing experience.