Ask HN: What was your first programming experience?
6 comments
My father taught my brother and I Visual Basic.
Watching my Mom who was a "typist"(google it if your too young to know what that is!) ,enter in page after page of code from a computer magazine into our family PC. Then watch my Dad spend the next few days debugging her typos and then finally transfer the program to a tape recorder. I'm pretty sure the first game was a text based version of lunar lander.
Typing in a page of Basic code from Atari magazine on the membrane keyboard of an Atari 400. After correcting all my typing errors (an even more tedious process) I was able to play a game where you would climb up a skyscraper, dodging hazards that were dropped on you.
I never stuck with programming.
I never stuck with programming.
Ten years old, typing BASIC games into a TRS-80 Model I from a book. Then at eleven, got a C-64 for Xmas, and taught myself BASIC and 6502 assembly. I had to learn assembly because BASIC couldn't handle the I/O speed of 2400 baud :-D
Now I write encryption libraries for a Major Cloud Provider
Now I write encryption libraries for a Major Cloud Provider
1973 or 74, BASIC on a Honeywell 1640 at Northeast Missouri State University.
Edit: It's interesting a lot of people seem to have a similar experience (thanks BASIC!). I thought there'd be more "I played with JS in the browser in early 2010", or "I attended a programming bootcamp after studying law to get an engineering job" type experiences as well.