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How did you get started into Computers (More than a casual user..)

dabone

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Feb 26, 2009
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Chattanooga, TN - USA
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of old computer magazines. This got me thinking about my timeline of getting into and learning computers.
I was born in 71 and got to first touch a computer in 3rd grade. It was a TRS-80 Model 1, and I was hooked. So, begging for what seemed to be forever I got my first Vic-20 Christmas of 1982

My first year of computer ownership was learning to type (and type in) programs from early computer magazines and the Vic-20 manual.
This was a long process, as I didn't have any storage device, not even a tape. For writing my own programs, I had a notebook.
But seeing as I only had 3.5K to work with, it wasn't that much to redo when I screwed up.

This apparently showed my parents that computers weren’t just a passing fad for me. So the next Christmas,1983 a C64 and 1541 appeared under the tree for me.
I went and saw my uncle a few weeks later, and he gave me my first pirated game disks.
(Atarisoft? MS-Pac and Donkey Kong)
The next year I remember Fastload being incredible, and just working.
I never learned machine language, but I did write a terrible adventure game in basic that used nearly all the ram.
I kept playing with that machine and learning things.
I spend most of a summer holed up in my room with Ultima 3. And a lot of Jumpman.

During that time period my mother was the Data Processing Manager at the accounting firm she worked at, and they had some accountants join that had Commodore Pets, that they now needed to be able to print the same type forms on all the computers at the firm. In those days, programmers were few and far between. So, they handed me (I think I was around 13) a book with simple basic accounting programs, Amortization of loans, etc. And I converted them to run and print on the Pets and the IBM pcs. And made simple menus for them. I remember that they paid me in blank floppy disks.

Eventually I upgraded to the 128 with a 1571. 80 Columns at home, that was nice.

Along the way, one of my mother’s clients had me assemble and configure an IBM clone for him, because he saw how I was with the ones at her office.

But by 87, I also had my father's hand me down Apple //c, and then he gave me his old pc. Kind of.

My father had access to computers, and some at home, but my parents were divorced, and we never visited our father, he would just show up a few times a year, so the only home machines I had access to were mine.

He brought me the box of parts that he had taken out of his machine when he upgraded and the rest of the new parts I needed, and I built my first IBM PC that was actually mine.
4.77Mhz.... CGA graphics, 10 Meg ST-213 Hard Drive. I was in heaven for the bigger things I could do at home finally. Yeah, the game graphics were crap, but everything else was so much better.

After that, I barely every touched my 8bit Commodores again. So, anything after 87 was a whatever for the 8 bits.

At 17, I started working at a local computer store, and within the year had the job of the technician. And I've never stopped since. (I did end up having and selling amigas in the 90s)
But I’ve always tried to keep up with the curve. Yeah, I’m at little behind at the moment, I’m typing this on my I7-9700k, so I’m a few generations behind at home. But at 51, I'm still on my first career.
(I’m technical support for the technical support guys)

After typing this out and seeing how much my parents invested in my future in those early days,
I can say, I never thanked them enough...
 
My brother talked a bit about a 3 week project at his school. The project was several students and a teacher, and they assembled an IMSAI 8080, and each got a TI-58 to boot.

The next year, at the same school, I was in 10th grade, the teacher showed me the 8080. There it was in all its blue blinken light glory, with an open chassis monitor (No touchy!) and a keyboard running BASIC. He showed me the fundamentals of BASIC, and I proceeded for the rest of the afternoon to flail badly as I had clearly forgotten something fundamental about BASIC (expression, mostly).

The next day, he showed me again, and it stuck. At the end of the year, a patron donated 6 PETs and boxes of 5 minute cassette tapes for storage.

So, for the next 2 years much of my waking free time was spent dickering with the PETs. I was leaving the window open to sneak in on the weekends.

Beyond those two, brief, introductory lessons, I had no "formal" instruction. It was all self taught. Books, mostly. I was even dabbling with 3D graphics on those 8K PETs.

My Dad was an engineer, and using a TRS-80 at work. Back then, everyone and their bother Tom was making microprocessors. And there was a bustling industry of binders of data sheets and the early Osborne books. It was from him I grokked the idea of a computer bus. During the summer, I'd spend time with him at his office banging away on the TRS-80. He got me a KIM-1 in my Senior year.

Off to college, I majored in Physics, but took a Fortran class my first term. I tried getting Fortran to work on the TRS-80, but never managed to get "hello world" out of it. The manual seemed to have implied knowledge of how Fortran worked, and the singular, creaky book I saw on the language wasn't really helpful at all (not having a tape drive or card reader handy, kthx).

College we had Cyber 730s, and that's where I learned about Fortran and time sharing and just a completely, utterly different world view of computing from the micro world of the PET. Honestly, this Fortran class was the only formal class that taught me something I didn't know, just enough to get started in the environment and get Fortran working. After that, I was off to the races. The other key event from that class was I met my lifelong best friend in that class when he was asking me questions about how to use XEDIT.

I never got my degree in anything. My grades were terrible, most of my time was spent in the computer labs, absorbing any and everything. Didn't much matter, apparently there was demand for autodidactic computer people in industry. I've done pretty much everything save for embedded applications since then. From missile simulations to accounting to healthcare.

Now, I'm pretty much a Unix/Java person.
 
For context I was an undiagnosed dyslexic as a kid and from K-3 was lumped in with every possible type and severity of cognitive / learning disability. The special needs "classroom" was some dark corner of, I kid not, the unfinished basement of the school. The teacher, unable to really provide any degree of individualized help, basically floundered. I remember sock puppets being used heavily. This is where I learned to hate school. We moved, changed school districts, and finally I was recognized as having an issue and worked with an itinnerant special education teacher in 4th and 5th grade who helped me turn things around.

In 6th grade the library bought 4 PET 4000's ( IIRC ) and nobody knew how to use them. When I asked, the librarian pointed me at a pile of manuals. About all I could get them to do is say 'SYNTAX ERROR" and on asking my various teacher he said "I have no idea" - I mean it was ridiculous. So I used my library time to figure them out, actually read the manuals, started writing little programs. Then writing my own variations of things like the lunar lander text based sort of games. Many of the kids actually wanted to play them.

The dyslexia tie-in is that, strangely enough, computers are VERY unforgiving about spelling, syntax, etc. LOL. So I struggled, greatly, against this machine that demanded perfection. And over time, I improved a lot I think owing to having to develop mental tricks to deal with this - and getting this ruthless prompt feedback. Instead of some adult hassling me because of my poor spelling, it was this stupid impersonal machine. Instead of being shamed for poor performance, it was more of a game to be beaten. And I learned BASIC programming.

Entering high school, I wanted a computer. Christmas rolled around and under the tree was a ... large rectangular box - an Atari 400 and the only cartridge left on the shelves: the Assembler Editor. My dad had no idea what that was, but he wanted to have something to go with the 400. So I learned assembler, how to do vertical blank animation, and eventually got a 800 and a eprom burner and started making proper games and a bunch of other things like a windowing library and my own macro assembler.

One thing I was especially proud of was writing device drivers to enable use of off-the-shelf braille keyboard and a braille output device. With $3K in added peripherals it turned the 400 / 800 into a computer usable by a blind student - at the time such computer cost $20K, and were barely functional for word processing. Any Atari app that used the standard K: S: E: devices for UI would "just work" so this included many atari productivity titles, and anything one might write in BASIC. As a 15 year old I am on the phone calling Sunnyvale for $1 a minute trying to convince the braille device company to send me demo units and developer documentation. It was laughable. I then reallized a business looking letter might be better - typed up machine gun style on an Atari 1027.

Thats my story.
 
That's a great story Bob. I have a weird form of speech dyslexia which only pops up during casual conversations. I have no problem reading a script, but once in a while I'll blurt out something like "cuppy coff" for "coffee cup". It also happens when I'm typing and some characters get inserted in reverse order. Most of the time I just laugh it off and repeat the proper sequence and once in a while someone will say "did you just say something backwards".
 
I'm going to do this in installments.

First computer: TRS-80 Model I Level I. It was a Christmas, either 4th or (more likely) 5th grade. When I first got it, it was for my brother and I, and I remember being frustrated trying to type in a program... I didn't know how to get to the next line... So I used spaces, then started typing the next statement and... Boom.. End of line buffer, can't type anymore....

I finally started reading the manual, and learned about the enter key. From there, started playing a lot with it. My brother soon lost interest, so it became my computer. Eventually, got it upgraded to a 16k with Level II basic.

Then later, an expansion interface with 32K and a floppy drive (just one :( ).

My father mentioned someone he knew that worked at the local newspaper, in their "Systems" room. He and I started getting along quite well, and at some point, we both built a modem (same kit) that could go up to 600 baud (with lots of transmission errors). We created a BBS, he worked on the basic part, I worked on the machine language part -- disabling remote ^c, redirecting COM to kbd / video, and if some how, they entered the basic command line, it automatically put "RUN<enter>" in the keyboard buffer to restart the BBS software, which immediately hung up the phone and started up again.

Fun times.
 
Oh boy, prepare for a huge wall of text....how do I write this without writing my whole life story.....lol...admittedly, I'm a bit of a weirdo and I got into things very late due to my socioeconomic situation growing up, so all my tech has always been between 5-10 years old even when I'm using it as a "modern" machine.

Basically, I was predisposed to "geekery" as a kid, into video games. I cut my teeth on IBM Ps/2s in school, a Tandy 1000 SX at my sister's dad's house (I have a different dad to make a long story short). Then the internet came around and through my now bro-in-law I got a taste of that as well. My oldest sister had a 386 that introduced me to Monkey Island, Ultima, and Freddy Pharkas. So of course, I wanted a computer - ANY computer, badly! My oldest sister once forbade me from using the 386 because of a corrupted config.sys file that cost $60 to fix, so I vowed I'd build the big, bad, mean "486" she had been pining for, lol.

Spring around 1997, my second oldest sister was moving out of town to get on with her life and I was given the Tandy 1000 SX. It was through this experience I would find out just how horribly under-estimated that machine was. It basically spent all it's time between 1986 and 1992 either sitting on a desk collecting dust, running Professional Write or doing Pathology and College stuff, or me occasionally playing Microsoft Adventure on it (which I thought was the extent of it's capabilities).

Through there I had a friend in my sister's collegate neighborhood - William, who had a dad who was big-time into RPG's, and despite having a Macintosh he had a BUNCH of "big box" DOS RPGs on 360K Floppies! I had gotten into Dragon Warrior IV the year before on the NES and wanted to dig deeper into Ultima so I brought home Ultima V and the 360K edition of fUltima VI. Ultima V would run fine, Ultima VI would not because the Tandy only had the stock 384K RAM, and I needed 640K.

So enter Radio Shack - which I knew already Tandy was sold through. So I went there and dug through their outdated catalogs - this was the summer of 1998 - yes NINTEY-EIGHT - and I paid $45.00 for a upgrade to 640K just to Run Ultima VI on this machine. And the result was less than spectacular, the 16-color graphics were a downgrade from the VGA my sister's 386 had, and everything ran with the snap of a slug on Valium. Traveling from Brittania to Yew took me an entire morning - weather and time was almost in real-time. I guess you could say the Tandy was bringing me sort of a crappy early form of "Virtual Reality", lol.

During that time, a family friend, Larry, introduced me to the concept of being a freelance computer technician. Because he was. And he promised to build a 486 if I got my grades up and left a ZEOS motherboard in our kitchen cupboard. Sometime over the next few years he stopped coming around and I knew that if I wanted a 486, I would have to build it myself.

So over the course of 2000 I took to the street curbs grabbing anything "computer" and building my own 486, I had the lower half of a very-rotted Packard Bell 386SX with AT PSU and 1.44M Floppy, the top half of a Packard Bell 486 case, I was cutting and hacking, not even knowing what I was doing for the most part, building an AT motherboard into an LPX chassis with a Packard Bell power supply. I used the I/O sheild from my dead Tandy (8253 chip failed), and burned up 2 different monitors trying to find some kind of video card fort that would work.

Then in 2001, I had joined a metal band, and our rhythm guitarist, Hawk, had a father who had some old computers to get rid of, so I took one home on my 18th birthday, a Flight 386 SX - basically a generic 386 SX AT clone, with a Chicony Keyboard and Addonics monitor. I ran it stock for about 2 weeks, playing Ultima VI and Monkey Island on it.

Then 2 weeks in I got a wild hair and decided to attempt my first motherboard upgrade. I knew absolutley nothing about what I was doing, I had to use GUITAR electronics as a reference for wiring, no guides, no books, no reference, and when I put the computer back together with the Zeos motherboard in it, it would not POST, just power on with a blank screen.

Let's just say anger is a huge motivator for me......

I called up about 3-4 diffrent computer shops in Opelika Alabama and got laughed off the phone by all but one of them - Duncan Services - who only had tto tell me, over the phone, that I had the IDE cable backward, and sure enough, I flipped the stripe to Pin1 and the Flight/ZEOS tore into the AWARD POST sequence. I was proud of my ignorantly carried out work, and called back Duncan to thank them for their help.

Somewhere about this time Anger came in yet again in the form of the subject of putting this hodge-podge 486 box on the internet. By this point I had bought a few PC books - Upgrading and Frepairing PC's for Dummies, and one of those more advanced Mueller books. And ALL of them still had 486 topics in there. But when I'd bring up putting this old 486 DX-33 on the internet people kept saying "You can't do it, it can't handle a modem" - including one System Admin in our social circle obsessed with Skyrim and AMD Athlons. But the books were saying otherwise.....so I soldiered on, and by summer, we eput a 56K V90 Faxmodem on this thing, and put it on AOL, and lo and behold, I now had internet, I now had e-mail, and I could instant message my bandmates.....and so the first half of the naughty oughties were spent with me tying up phonelines from Montgomery to Wadley!

It was about that time that word got around and now everyone was throwing their old PC's and Macs at me. I found I enjoyed this and it was a nice break from guitars and video games messing with the hardware and software side. I think at my peak I had 32 computers at my childhood home - nuts. And we think I have a lot now with six laptops and five desktops in the 8088-Pentium eras, lol. I basically funded my move to Seattle on old x86 iron in 2005. I have gotten to taste or use everything from the original IBM PC 5150 in my auto shop class in high school (pirating games for the Tandy, and bringing my savegames in to play on the 5150), to IBM PS/2s of many flavors ISA and MCA, Compaq Deskpro 286s and 386s, At least 4-5 different Tandy 1000 systems, over 60 different "Clones" of various types ranging from XT's to AT's, GEM Computer Products, AMT, BSI, Duracom, Data Experts, Packard Bell...IBM Edu Quests (I've owned 4), even quite a few Macs ranging from the SE series of 1989 to quite a few various Power Macintosh machines including the 6100, 6400, 7100, and 5200/LC. I've also rescued a lot of these machines from recycling, street curbs, and thrift shops, and I even see some of my old ones crop up on e-bay from time to time (I think that DEC 486 DX2 66 in another thread might be one I sold in 05').

On the career side, I started nabbing certs with A+ in 2004, and started building experience right away afterward. I spent all of 06' doing various IT IMAC projects around Seattle/Redmond/Bellevue/Everett. Now I'm a senior support tech for a medical company and learning more skills off the network and systems engineers and admins. I'm as fluent in modern systems now as I am in oldschool systems, and I'm probably the only guy my age or younger whose comfortable with command lines and other low-level stuff.

On the hobbyist side, I almost got out of vintage PC's in 2010 when I met my wife, because it seemed to be going nowhere. Then suddenly, LGR, 8-bit Guy, and Adrian's Digital Basement channels took off, it became this "hot" thing I'd predicted 10-15 years before (told ya so), and I decided to get back into it again. Now I mostly limit myself to things 80486 and older since I already had stuff in that range when I started back up in 2012, and the Pentium onward is just too similar to modern computing to really interest me, and my skillset has gone to basic modular swaps to full on circuit level repairs as my guitar-related-electronics-skills paralleled it (ie building pedals/amps and more complex active guitar circuits of my own design).
 
Part 2: CP/M

so after several years of working on my TRS-80, my father asked about an IBM PC, but I went the way of CP/M. I cobbled together a system with a BigBoard II, with dual 8 inch drives, steel case, external power supply with custom built power cable to the screw terminals on the CPU and to the two 8 inch drives. Got a keyboard from surplus that was whatever the BigBoard used for keyboard input, and a 15khz (I think?) amber monitor for 80 x 25 display. Once booted up and running… I had to start coding so that I could use a terminal program (I think it had built in xmodem). I had to witemthe routines to set the baud rate, and I/O for spine serial ports (via Z80 SIO), then build a cable to use it… I think the first work I did was to write a TRS-80 basic program to send data to the serial port for a simple file transfer program, because at the time I used the TRS-80 to connect to BBSs to download tools and such.

——————————
Correction, I didn’t have any terminal / file Transfer at first, that is why I used the TRS-80 - I think I used PIP to get files over. And for a while I didn’t have a Z80 assembler on CP/M, so I used to compile on the TRS-80 and send it over to CP/M. I loathe all assembler mnemonics other than Z80….
——————————

All of this while in High School, including the next installment….
 
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Part 3: IBM PC

Sometime during high school, I got a one or two drive IBM 5150 with CGA and color monitor. My first mod to it was a switch on the CGA card that selected the alternate character set in the character generator rom. Working with my friend at the newspaper, I eventually got a hard drive controller card and a small 3.5 inch half height disk drive, 10mb maybe? I didn’t have any way to mount it, so I took the cover off where the second floppy went, and placed the drive on a block of foam…

Shortly after that, we learned that both the drive and the drive controller supported RLL, so we redid the low level format and got an extra 5mb of space. Continuing from there, I remember getting sidekick and using it a lot, and created a couple of simple TSRs that did things I was used to on the CP/M and TRS-80. shortly after, it was time for college… My brother was already attending (University of Florida, Go Gators!), and I found out I was going to be in one of the oldest dorms (built in 1905). Also, it didn’t have AC… a not too fun idea in Florida….

So I get there, and low and behold, it has been completely renovated to have heat / AC via hot / chilled water. Salvation in August! (For those not familiar with Florida, UF is is Giainesville, FL, also called the arm-pit of Florida… Hot, humid, and no breeze…)

To boot, it was the first dorm on campus to be wired for computers! Each room had an RS/232 jack on the wall! 9600 baud connection to DecNet I think it was called. From it, I could reach NERDC (IBM mainframe), the DEC VAX, and, as I found out most importantly, the Gould system (BSD Unix for computer science use). Of course, I had my trusty 30 foot serial cable (and modem too).
Thus begins computer science fun!
To be continued….
 
Graduated with a business degree in management...landed my first job 30+ years ago in a management consulting firm coding in COBOL (had close to zero programming experience, so had to swim 2x just to keep up). The network manager moved to another company and I stepped into his role. The rest is computer magic history. Technology addiction ever since, well, at least until about 2005. Not quite the obsession any more as things move/change TOO quickly...which is why my comfort zone is the older/vintage stuff now.
 
During my college days, I took as many EE courses as I could that dealt with digital electronics. To the point that in one class, we were programming PALs for various projects, but I was the only one around that also had a PAL programmer in my dorm room. I also cobbled together a Z8 based computer, and I had the one that had a 24 pin socket on top, and it came with a basic on that ROM. I connected up some hex displays, and I was off!

Got to go, dinner time
 
Later in college, one of my roommates decided to make an ISA card (EE major, I was CIS major). So, next time I went home, I brought back the ferric chloride and a copper clad board, and my rub on transfer PC board traces and pads. He came up with an 8255, I created a PAL to do the bulk of the decoding, and we etched and soldered it up. He plugged it in to his PC, and it worked (I think we wrote a Turbo Pascal program for testing, used a logic probe to check to see if the outputs were changed. The only problem with the card was that it was exactly the width of an 8 bit ISA slot -- so you had to be careful to plug it in the right way... And sure enough, it was once plugged in the wrong way... And PC never made it past POST, died with a Parity Error. So, we turned it the right way around, and... Still wouldn't post. Now, I don't remember if he had the schematics for his PC, or we used mine, but looking at the NMI pin on the connector, we traced backwards, and found a blown 74lsxx chip (don't remember which). Actually, it was just one gate of the chip, so...We piggy backed a good one on it and cut the bad pins off (chip wasn't in a socket) and used the still soldered pins and soldered the new chip's pins to it, as well as power and ground. We bent the rest up, so no contact was made.... And it fixed the PC. I think he wrote on the board after that. (Too bad it wasn't FRONT TOWARD ENEMY).
 
Well, I got started late. In my youth I was interested in computers but we did not have much money and no one in my family worked around computers. In Junior High school a teacher introduced his classes to the Commodore PET and I took a computer class where I did simple BASIC programming on a PET. That was the last time I got my hands on a computer until after I got married about 8 years later. That's when it started for me.

I was married in 1987. My FIL had bought a NorthStar Advantage CP/M computer system for his accounting several years earlier, in about 1982. By this time in 1987 he had an IBM PC 5150 and the Advantage was in the attic. While in his attic I ran accross the old Advantage system and I asked permission to take it home and play with it. He gave me permission and told me his history with the system - he never really used it. My wife used it a little for the accounting for their business but then they got the IBM and never used it again.

I took it home. It came with all the books and software and manuals. So, I worked through everything on my own until I learned how to connect it to the phone line with a modem, which I purchased on my own, probably at a Radio Shack. Then I spent countless hours on bulletin boards and information services asking questions about CP/M and the Z80, floppy drives, hard drives, etc. Eventually I upgraded the dual floppy system with a 5MB hard drive and left one of the floppy drives. Then I hooked up a Smith Corona daisy wheel serial printer and used WordStar to create and print our installation contracts for our business (Wood Stoves).

Not long after I purchased my first PC clone, a Tandy 1400FD portable. Eventually that took over duties of the Advantage and the Advantage went back into storge. I still have it in my collection today, 35 years later.

Seaken
 
My foray into computers was a long and often frustrating one.

My first interaction with a computer was with an Apple in school. We were to do a bunch of calculations on a sheet of paper, then program the results into the application running to move the triangle (they referred to it as the "turtle") to draw an image on the screen. Those of us bad at math would end up with a mess on the screen, while those who were good at math had these really cool drawings appear. The teacher then informed us all that only those good at math would ever find a career in computers. Incredibly discouraged, I avoided any notion of ever getting into computers, though using them was undeniably appealing to me.

Fast forward roughly 10 years later, still in school, and only those with good grades were allowed to use the computer lab. My only chance at getting my hands on a computer was to take a typing class. The final exam, worth 75% of your grade, was typing the English alphabet without looking at the keyboard. Looking at the keyboard was the only way I knew how to learn to type, so I failed that class miserably. That was another nail in the coffin for me trying to get into computers. By the way, within a few years I was able to type without looking at the keyboard and I was able to achieve up to 80 wpm.

About a year later I started dating my future wife who's family recently purchased a Laser XT Turbo around 1991. Ever since I started playing with DOS on that system, I knew I wanted to write my own programs to make the computer easier to use. Initially, I wanted to write a friendlier DOS-clone called MY-DOS (as in "my", a couple years before MS used the "my" nomenclature in Windows 9x). I struggled to learn how to program in machine language, assembly, and C, and having previously been discouraged from using computers in the past, I never pushed myself very hard to learn to program. Realizing I was in far over my head, I scaled back my plans of writing a DOS clone and settled on just a suite of utilities in the vein of Norton Utilities. But since I couldn't program in any of those languages, I settled on writing batch files.

I subscribed to nearly every computer magazine that focused on PCs, most of them I still have. I read everything I could to learn more about them until I eventually came across PC Magazine's utilities, and in particular a program from Michael J. Mefford called BAT2EXEC.COM, and another utility called BATCHMAN.COM. These were the main pieces to my suite of applications I would write in .BAT, compile, and named the Dobson Utilities.

I eventually ended up buying my own computer about a year later; a refurbished Packard Bell mini-tower. It was barebones, which was fine because that would give me the opportunity to upgrade it and learn how to do those upgrades myself. It's original configuration was a 486SX 25MHz CPU, no L2 cache, 130MB Conner hard drive, 2MB of RAM (soldiered to the motherboard), and a 3.5" 1.44MB drive and a 5.25" 1.2MB floppy. No CD-ROM. No sound card. No modem. I still have this machine and I still use it from time to time, though every aspect of upgrade has been done to it.

My story doesn't stop there, but I think that sufficiently answers the "how did you get started in computers" question.
 
The teacher then informed us all that only those good at math would ever find a career in computers

I remember that attitude. Because of that, I didn't do computer science at school, did Geography instead and hated it.

Went to every computer club session after school and quickly got to grips with PET Basic then had a ZX81 followed by a BBC B and devoured Ian Birnbaum's Assembly Language programming for the BBC.

Got a craft apprenticeship and did well on the (little BA sized) spanners, then finally got my first engineering job.

Programming computers operating nuclear reactors !!!!!

No formal computer training or degree and suddenly responsible for maintaining and modifying the control software on two 1.6GW graphite power reactors on the strength of self teaching :)

Ha, computer science teachers !!! What do you know :)

Me, being totally topsy turvey, I then did my degree and now I run said reactors.
 
I remember that attitude. Because of that, I didn't do computer science at school, did Geography instead and hated it.

Sadly, I didn't have the confidence to advance my education until my early 40s. Ever since taking a few coding classes in college, I've been bitten by the programming bug to return to my original idea of writing a suite of utilities for DOS and Windows 3.1x - which is the passion project I'm currently working on.
 
I had always planned to go into medicine until in 9th grade they introduced us to TSS/8 via a TTY and a phone coupler. It connected to a pdp-8i running
TSS/8. I talked to the guy in the Visual Ed dept and he suggested the book "Introduction to Programming". That was it I was hooked. Learned everything
I could about that 8's. Had hoped to get hired by DEC, but they took too long getting me a interview invitation and I was already working at Sperry Univac.
Haven't looked back since, but moved thru many jobs and programming languages. Now I am retired and play with my 11/84, Decmate and Rainbow. Along
with a few other machines.
 
Got interested in Electronics/Ham Radio after one of our Geography teachers let on that he was an old time HAM, and would be happy to devote some of his lunchtimes to helping those interested to become proficient in Morse/Radio Theory.
(It helped as I became VK2VCY and later VK2LR here in AU).

Long story short, he had an Altair in the social science office which he tinkered with is his spare time. (this is 76-77 timeframe).
Five minutes in front of it, I was hooked!

Did odd jobs in school holidays till I could afford a SYM-1.
Guy at the shop upsold me to an OSI Superboard 2.
Good idea in hindsight as it was much easier for a beginner like myself at the time.
After that came a TRS-80 Model-1, Apple ][, Amiga 500, 1200 etc.

Over the years people have given me all kinds of computers when they learned I was a retro enthusiast. 30+ at last count.

Generally prefer fixing them, and seeing them work again than actually using them these days.
Working as a computer tech/programmer, the last thing I want to do when I come home is use computers.

Might feel different about it when I retire in roughly 6 years time, and have more free time on my hands....

Cheers,
Leslie
 
My dad's school had purchased a TRS-80 (Model I before there was any other models) that sat languishing in a store room. He pulled it out and learned how to use it.
He made the mistake of bringing it home one summer and I sort of took it over.

That was in 1978. By the time I got to High School (and they started to have classes in computers), I had already learned more than my teachers and already figured out Dijkstra's "GOTO less programming".
 
In 1975 I learned FORTRAN with a keypunch in Mr. Dyk's class. In 1976 I learned BASIC on the Altair 8800a. The story on page 8 of MITS Computer Notes:
 

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