Breaking computers taught me to build them

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.

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.

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.

My family got a computer when I was in 3rd grade (1994-ish?) and I was immediately obsessed. A year or two went by of me just clicking every button I could find on the computer to see what happened, most of which was nothing. Eventually the idea of making my own programs hit me. I remember asking every adult I could how to "build programs". Nobody knew or at least nobody took me seriously. Eventually a family friend, who happened to be a Navy Admiral and at one point on the joint chiefs of staff, actually responded affirmatively. He showed me a small program he had written for his son that mimicked some air traffic and had callsigns on the airplanes like "Goose" and "Maverick". He sent me home with a copy of QBasic on a 3.5" floppy and a BASIC programming book. It was all downhill from there.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Mom was a COBOL programmer. She saw the direction things were headed with computing. The family got an Apple //c for Christmas in 1984. In the spring, she enrolled me in a six week one night a week course for computer programming at the local high school. We learned BASIC on Apple ][ e.

I took the knowledge and ran with it. Didn’t take long to want more, found a game programming book using assembly - but since I didn’t have an assembler, I entered machine code directly. That kept be engaged for years.

My grandfather saw that computers were going to be important. So, he got me a Commodore64. Inflation adjusted, that was probably a $600 gift for an 8 year old. I tried copying the code from the magazines. But, it didn't click until that same grandfather sent me to a summer camp that was mostly sports, but also had a class in LOGO (TurtleDraw). Thanks, Grandpa!

In high school, the IT guy got bored and started a class teaching Pascal. The whole class timeshared a Linux 386 via amber Wyse terminals. He also had a follow-on class that taught C. But, his attitude was "If you made it through the first class and came back, you're cool. Here's a book on C and a compiler. Go make up your own assignments and I'll be busy teaching Pascal to the new kids over there." I've been programming C/C++ for over 25 years now. Thanks, IT Guy!

My earliest "programming" attempts were when I was seven years old. I would delete lines of basic from a simple game called Dungeon on our Commodore Pet to see what would happen. Obviously most of the time it just broke, but I did get some interesting effects, such as the dungeon becoming one big room instead of rooms and passages, or all the monsters becoming the same type. Those changes fascinated me and began an interest in learning more about basic so I could understand better why these things were happening, and off I went from there.

(Hey, neat, here's a browser based version of the game: https://www.commodoregames.net/CommodorePET/Dungeon-86.html)

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.