Although I had high school exposure to FORTRAN, I began my life-long love of programming in 1970 at Stony Brook University where I had many programming classes that involved the IBM 360/67 and DEC PDP-10. I learned all the major languages at the time, including Algol, PL/1, FORTRAN IV, Snobol, Basic Assembly Language, and my favorite back then - Lisp, i.e. Maclisp on the PDP-10. My first job was programming for a bank in COBOL, and I continued with commercial data processing for two decades. I bought a TRS-80 in 1978 and programmed it in Basic as well as assembler. Likewise I built and programmed an x86 PC every couple of years since they came out. In the early 1990's, the utility company I worked for switched new projects to Smalltalk. And in the mid 1990's I learned Java. In 1999, I began working for Cycorp in Austin where I returned to lisp, and a bit of Java. Since 2006 I have been programming Java and some JavaScript.
At 60 years old, I look back on a long career of programming - with the most exciting work coming late in life as a founder of a tech startup - Android, websockets, semantic web, natural language processing, and programmable web. Its just great! I wonder what the next couple of decades will bring ...