Ask HN: What's Your Story? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's Your Story?

57 pointsfjordan64 comments

How did you become interested in computers/technology?

For some of us, it was very early, possibly so early that it may be difficult to remember. For others, including myself, it was a more recent development.

I didn't become interested in computers until high school, when at that time I was so computer illiterate it was almost comical. In fact, it was a specific point in time, I remember, that my older brother made fun of me because I was constantly asking for his help. I decided to make a change and begin teaching myself about these amazing machines and all the power that they possess. After learning the general basics, I quickly picked up a book on C programming and worked my way through it. I now continue to personally develop my knowledge every day, using tools such as iTunesU and MIT OpenCourseWare to supplement my education.

I am now an undergraduate student studying computer science and enjoying every minute of it. So much so, that I wish I had decided to study electrical and/or computer engineering/physics so that I could have a more robust understanding of how these machines work at the hardware level.

The point of my question is to discover others' personal history regarding their venture into the constantly changing world of technology.

Please share.

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Nothing interesting about my first story: I got a boring cubicle job in a large enterprise that needed 12 programmers to do anything, blah, blah, blah. But I did do some good work for a vice president who remembered me when he moved to another company, which leads to my second story, my real story:

He brought me in to his new company to do a consulting job to answer 2 questions, "What do we have to do to get Order Entry, Shop Floor Control, and Standard Costing written and running?" and "How many programmers do I need to hire?"

They had 400 employees, were missing all of these mission critical apps, and had only 1 programmer. But he was all they ever needed. I worked with him for 3 months and he wrote all of the software needed using tools and techniques none of us had ever seen before.

He did instant analysis and design, wrote disposable apps, did rapid prototyping, stepwise refinement, and extreme programming years before anyone ever heard of these things. He never wrote the same line of code twice, writing standard functions and reusable components. If he knew he needed something twice, he wrote a parameter-driven code generator on the fly and had me collect the parameters for him. He even coded in Boolean algebra and had an engine that converted it into production source code. He threw things into production long before anyone else would, figuring it was easier to just keep reworking them instead of waiting until it was perfect.

He was a one man shop in a $150 million company. He was smart, he worked hard, he loved what he did, but most of all, he didn't know that "it couldn't be done", so he just did it.

Three months watching Dick build stuff, and I was hooked for life. I had to do it, too. And I've been doing pretty much the same thing ever since, pausing only long enough to add a few new technologies to my tool box along the way.

Sometimes I wonder what horrible cubicle I'd be wasting away in if I hadn't met Dick and saw what was really possible.

So now I'm curious, what ever happened to Dick?

I don't post very often on HN, but I like to recall my little story.

So I was around 6 and we had a 386 at home, with DOS. I knew the very basics to "cd" into a "dir", and type the dir name again to start the program. Of course this didn't work for every program, probably not for those I shouldn't be using :)

One day I saw someone playing the snake game. I asked how could I go into that program too, and it turned out I had to "cd" into "qbasic", start "qbasic", and then hit F5. I never questioned why, but after hitting F5, the snake game started (I think the name of the game was "nibbles").

One other day though, just before hitting F5, I read a bit of what was on the screen of "qbasic", which was, well, some BASIC code for the game. And at the top was a line the intrigued me:

CONST SAMMYS_LIVES = 3

I knew the snake had 3 lives on every game, and that "Sammy" was written somewhere on the screen during the game (English is not my mother tongue; I surely didn't know much at 6). So this time, before hitting F5, I replaced the 3 with 9, and then hit F5. Behold, I actually had 9 lives!

I immediately quit, started "qbasic" again and changed 3 to 9999999999999999999 (something like that, probably longer). I was baffled when F5 didn't start the game anymore, and a strange line appeared. I kept reducing the 9's until it worked again.

That day I finished the game, but soon enough I was changing the colors, removing walls, creating levels, and figuring why F5 sometimes didn't work. The rest is history :)

(for the sake of my uh reputation, let me clearly state I never "coded" in BASIC since then ;) )

I had a similar experience with Gorillas. I started exploring the code and noticed a variable called banana. I didn't realize changing a game was so easy, so I changed the variable to baby. Unfortunately, it wasn't so easy, and inexplicably the gorillas continued to throw bananas.

Understanding why is what got me hooked.

I tried to change the Nibbles snakes to lizards by changing variables with "snake" in them to "lizard"...that didn't work right away either.

I got my first "real" computer at age 7...an IBM XT. I took it apart the next day just to see how it worked. I spent hours on end on the DOS command line or writing silly programs in BASIC. Upgraded every few years, getting new computers with new features. In 1990, I got a system with a Sound Blaster, so I got into MIDI recording. In 1992 I got a CD-ROM and got into hacking Sierra games. In 1995 I got AOL and got obsessed with chatrooms and warez. In 1998 I started college and was introduced to high speed internet. That was the real defining moment for me. Being able to download any song, movie, or piece of software at will made the internet the most amazing thing in the world. And since the way to access it was through websites, I downloaded Photoshop and Dreamweaver and learned web design. Since the best sites were interactive, I needed to learn web programming as well, so I walked to the campus bookstore and bought Learning Perl by Larry Wall.

In December 1999 I built my first website, Ziggles.com, a comparison shopping site written in Perl that spidered the top 20 online bookstores and displayed the results with affiliate links. I made about $1000 a month in revenue (nearly all profit since I was already living on ramen at the time) and even got job offers from Silicon Valley startups. In another year or two I probably could have gotten hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, but the bubble burst and reality set in.

Those all night coding marathons or days spent reading Advanced SQL techniques when I should have been reading Shakespeare (English major) have paid off, since I make a better living as a developer than I could working in an English factory.

Well, that was anticlimactic. Can you change the ending to where you have a multi-million dollar exit?

Work on that, will you? :)

Oops...I left out the final chapter:

After selling my social/search/shopping startup GoogTwitFaceGroupon, I retired at 30 as the world's first trillionaire.

My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable:

http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html

It didn't take me long to pimp it up with a custom autoexec.bat file and to start playing in BASIC.

    10 PRINT "RYAN IS GREAT"
    20 GOTO 10

My mom gave me a BASIC manual at some point, and I started working my way through it, learning how to change the screen to paint graphics, load and save data from data files, write subroutines (GOSUB), modularize programs into multiple files, and so on.

Soon I was making cheesy, derivative text adventures and space battle games and creating sound effects. I even wrote a rudimentary text editor for school essays, though I eventually supplanted it with the superior VolksWriter.

I mostly lost interest in computers during the 1990s, aside from playing around with Midisoft Recording Session, a Yamaha TG-100 and a Tascam 4-track. As such, I completely missed the advent of the World Wide Web.

It wasn't until 1999 that I got a laptop and an email address at work, and quickly got excited about this internet thing.

My boss asked me if I could make a website for our department and I said, "Sure!" Then I called a friend who was taking computer science at school and asked whether it was hard to make a website. It turned out not to be that hard, and so I gradually found myself turning into a web developer.

I remember my boss asking if the site could display summary reports dynamically. I sort-of knew about the existence of server-side preprocessors, so I looked into what we had our web server and discovered ASP. Imagine my surprise to look at the ASP source code and see BASIC staring back at me (albeit with a few objects bolted on).

Just recently I managed to get my old BASIC programs working again via DosBox running on Ubuntu.

lol GOSUB good old gosub...

I was so full of preteen exuberance when I first discovered gosub, totally revolutionized how I thought about computers

I surely wish I'd known someone in KY back in those days that wanted to teach C to a kid :/

Earlier this year I wrote a fan letter to Daniel D. McCracken, crediting him for inspiring me:

---

Some time in the mid-to-late-60s when I was a high school kiddie, I discovered to my dismay that I had succeeded in cleaning out my local public library of all its science fiction titles. I noticed an old-at-the-time volume, Wiener's "Cybernetics", and thought the title had a nice technical computer-y ring to it. Nevermind that I'd never seen a computer outside of NASA documentary films and didn't stand a ghost of a chance of ever meeting one.

A week later I closed the cover, contemplating what I'd read. There was something attractive there, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it, and I looked around for other computer-y titles. Sadly, there were none to be had. Shrug.

Next summer my parents moved to another city, giving me access to a new public library to plunder. That's when I found your Fortran guide; I tore through it, fascinated at the clarity with which you could program one of those storied beasts. I wrote a fair number of programs at home, curled up on the sofa under the lamp by the side table, thoroughly desk-checking and pretend-executing them. Couldn't run a single one, for I had no access to a computing system, but I was hooked solidly.

I got my Mom to drop me off in downtown Orlando so I could see what other computer titles there were at the big library. I came home with Weiss' Lisp 1.5 Primer. Wow that's different, I remember thinking.

My physics teacher had a handful of books on his shelf, including Fink's "Computers and the Human Mind", which was a fun read, and Adler's "Thinking Machines", which was also nontechnical but still exciting.

A brand-new state university was in its second year of operation in Fall of 1969, and offered one of the few computer science degrees that could be had in the US at the time. Best of all it was in my back yard, and there was little doubt that I'd do computer science.

40 years later here I am, still doing this stuff and still loving it.

In a substantial way, it's your doing. Thank you for that Fortran book, the first book I ever picked up that really fired me up, that told me that THIS is what I want to do.

When I was 10, my brother pestered my parents to buy us a computer, an Apple //e. He lost interest quickly, but then I picked up a manual.

When I look back at how focused I was then, I feel envy. I would just say "I am going to write a program that does my Latin homework" and actually deliver. Of course not with professional results, but credible attempts for someone not even in their teens, working only in Applesoft BASIC.

But I had no idea that what I was doing was valuable or unusual. I had no friends or teachers who thought it was even interesting. I just thought I had a weird hobby. Which is why it was easy to quit. In pre-university classes, I found the programming courses boring and felt I was nothing like anybody who was taking those courses. So I turned my back on it and went for journalism and graphic design. It wasn't until the internet went mainstream in a big way that I found a tribe of programmers I could identify with.

When I look back on my early years programming (from 10 to 14 or so), I also feel jealous for how un-self-conscious I was. I just did whatever I wanted. For instance, I produced hundreds of little programs to make pretty pictures with math. As an adult I struggle to reconcile my aesthetic and technical sides.

I was literally born into it — my parents met working at a software company and quit to start their own out of their apartment in the early 80s.

My dad started using computers in the early 60s at Berkley to do Mathematical Psychology for his Architecture PhD. His father started using computers as a naval officer in the early 50s, I think related to bomb testing when they lived on Kwajalein Atoll. My mother started programming in high school where she had dialin teletype access to a PDP to do her homework. Her stepmother started a little bit later when she took an office manager job at an early hosted multitenant accounting software company and worked her way up to being its CEO as a pc software company, and after it was acquired by a very large public software company was a VP there for a few years before retiring.

I'm a third-generation software guy on both sides of the family. What else would I do?

What else would I do?

Dance, man, dance!

The math class in school got some TRS-80 (trash as it was called) which nobody used. I stayed after class to play with them and learned its BASIC. My sister bought me an AppleIIgs, some BASIC books and an obscurely dense data structure book. I started by typing in the BASIC programs from the books and learned how they work.

Of course I spent way too much time playing computer games throughout high school. The only obvious benefit was it motivated me to learn about programming to write my own games, which never happened. I got into assembly because most games were written in it back then.

UCB had a summer program to let high schoolers sign up for classes. I took a Pascal class but felt it's too restrictive. When I signed up for a night class on C in a community college, I knew I found my language.

In university I got the formal training on data structure, compiler, database, Scheme/Lisp, etc. Compiler and database were my favorites. Somehow I didn't like AI. At the time I thought may be because it's the poor teaching of the professor, but now I think it's because there were fair amount of AI bullshit in the class. The things that I didn't have a chance to get into were network and graphic. It's years later that I took night class on network and communication at extension program.

Of course, once started working, it was database, database, and database.

Now if people asked is a formal CS education good? I would say yes it definitely helps. It forces you to explore many different topics that you might not be comfortable with.

I guess for me it started at around 8 when my dad brought home a ZX81 (which was old then). I spent hours reading the BASIC manual and typing in stuff which never, ever ran. I found the errata for it a few years back so I guess I could go back and fix?

From there I got a C64, which was incredible, and then moved on to the Amiga. 500+ -> 1200. As far as computing goes, the Amiga years were the best of my life. Suddenly everything seemed possible. I was coding in AMOS, C and assembler on that thing - and rendering 3D cars while I ate my tea. That machine could do the lot, and since I've always been rubbish at music the MIDI thing wasn't a problem.

Mid 90's as the Amiga died off, i got access to a 486 and wrote a few things here & there in BASIC. Finally blagged my mum into giving me £3 to buy a magazine that had Borcland C++ 4.5(?) on the coverdisc. Took it from there.

The rest is pretty boring really. Improved at C, took up web dev. Here I am.

Most importantly though - I had a bloody Amiga. Man, I miss those days.

"I had a bloody Amiga. Man, I miss those days."

Amen to that

I can still clearly remember being amazed when I first saw Deluxe Paint running on the Amiga in the late 80's. Poring over the latest edition of Amiga Format became a favourite weekly ritual. Those were the days!

My dad learned programming as a federal employee in the 60's. He didn't discuss programming with us, but some manuals and punch cards and program listings were always around the house. We also got to visit him at work a few times--think big bright cold mainframe computer rooms with tape drives spinning, printers chunking away, and lights flashing. I also remember him getting an award for making a program more efficient when working for a branch of the Defense Department. We still have the picture of my nerdly dad in his nerd garb receiving a plaque and a handshake from a brush-cut officer in full military uniform. Dad fought his part of the cold war by cataloging military surplus better, stronger, faster than it had been catalogued before. I grew up wanting to be an artist but leapt into marriage and starting a family right out of high school, and didn't take the risk of pursuing art. After starting junior college, I looked at the course catalog and felt deathly boredom emanating from every career choice except computer science. Not sure why, since I had no real exposure to computers per se. I had to buy a book just to tell me what computing and programming were. I enrolled in the business IT course, liked it, and thereafter never considered any other field. Funny, even though I started my computer education in 1982, at my school they still used punch cards, ratchety old mainframes, and loud printers--just like dear old Dad had used circa 1968. It felt right. That first year I learned Basic on a TRS-80, assembler on a System/360, and COBOL on a Burroughs mainframe. I still make my living on IBM assembler and COBOL, with no end to those technologies in sight (from my middle age standpoint, anyway). I play with Linux, bash, Scheme Java and MySQL on my own time.

I've had a deep interest in science, math, and technology since I was a tiny child. I nursed that interest by reading scifi/fantasy novels, old issues of various sci/tech magazines (Scientific American, National Geographic, Popular Science), the occasional text-book now and then, and especially Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I developed a strong attachment to programmable graphic calculators and later the family computer (an IBM PS/1 with 1meg of RAM, a 286 processor, and a 30meg harddrive) during high school. I had a huge collection of various programming projects, games, experiments, genetic algorithms, etc. But I didn't consider myself a "real" programmer.

In high-school I displayed an unnatural ease with mathematics, which lead directly toward attaining a bachelor's degree in the subject before I had the slightest clue what to do with it. Meanwhile, my interest in computers and programming had grown considerably, I pursued an additional bachelor's degree with a double major in Chemistry and Computer Science. It wasn't until I got my first job, while still going to school, that I realized how deeply software engineering was in my blood, and I haven't looked back since.

My Dad has been a programmer longer than I've been alive, so I've always been aware of programming. When I was 13, some friends and I built a ZX81 with my Dad's help, and then he taught us to program in BASIC. I was fascinated for a month or so, and then I forgot it. I don't think I even tried to program again until Senior year of highschool.

At my highschool, there is a tradition called Senior Projects. Every senior has to spend at least 50 hours (not very much) over the summer, working on a project of their choice.

I chose to make a videogame after talking to one of my cousins (another programmer). He recommended I pick up Python and use the PyGame library. Over the course of the summer I made a simple 2d game. I aced my presentation that fall, and then promptly forgot everything I knew about Python.

However, I enjoyed the project enough that I decided to study CS in college. My first CS class was what really got the ball rolling. Since that class (two years ago) I don't think I've had more than 20-30 days without programming.

If you are interested in this, you should try this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Computing-Jane-Mar...

They did a survey of CS students to find out their first experiences. They provide specific quotes in the book, but the gist of it was that men usually were given a computer (or everyone felt that the family computer was "theirs") and they began to tinker around immediately, whether that be with programming or taking it apart. The women's first experiences tended to involve watching a male family member work on the computer.

byoung2's comments follows the typical male answer and mine follows the typical female answer. I watched my 2 uncles and uncle-in-law in the computer since they had jobs in tech. Then my grandfather gave my mom and me a computer and showed us how to use it. I mostly just played on it and used programs until high school were I was "formally introduced" to programming.

I've often had similar thoughts about how men and women initially got involved in programming... why do you personally think that is? (I will look into the book.)

For one, it's our male role models who are using computers while our female role models aren't. Children are affected by such gender differences very early. They notice who drives the car when everyone goes out, who cooks dinner, and who works late.

Secondly, there are expectations about it. For example, if a boy takes apart a computer, everyone goes "such a boy", but if a girl does it, people say "hmm, that's odd." (even if it's good surprise, it's still surprise). I know when I was a child I was pushed to do things like ballet and cheerleading and orchestra when what I wanted to do was martial arts and read and become a scientist.

Have you considered that it might be the result of innate toy preference? It's pretty well established that the difference is innate (http://www.scribd.com/full/36579212?access_key=key-1ztjrngs9...), and it might have an influence on these early stories.

That's very interesting. I will have to take a look.

I think the point you brought up about the observance of younger children of their superiors is very true. I can recall fond moments of watching my father work on our early DOS machine. I used to play Doom II and Duke Nukem on Sunday nights as a kid and seemed to learn DOS quickly. However, as I stated earlier, it wasn't until later in high school that my interest seriously grew.

I have a strange history with computers. In fifth grade I was selected (still now sure how) to go to a week-long summer school class for programming. We used some sort of IBM PCs (I have no idea what they were, I just remember booting them up with a 5.5" floppy and having to punch in the correct time as it booted) and typing in the BASIC commands the teacher wrote on the board.

In eighth grade, me and a buddy spent way to much time programming a 'choose your own adventure' story in BASIC on an Apple IIe. Something from that fifth grade class must have stuck. For some reason though, I never connected what I was doing with computer science. I guess I thought I was just playing around with a toy or something, so when my college adviser suggested I major in Computer Science, I said no way.

At some point during High School I'd gotten my hands on a copy of Photoshop, Version 3 I think. That somehow led me to major in Information Design, which oddly was in the school of journalism. I took classes on print and web design, some flash even, but most of the curriculum was journalism-oriented.

After college I worked in newspapers for about six years, creating info graphics and designing pages, but I was always involved in any IT project that came along. I helped setup a content management system, upgrade servers, etc.

I also started in newspapers right about the time their downhill slide started. The conversation du jour was always about how newspapers could make it online. Eventually I transitioned to working on Flash projects, learning Actionscript 3 (basically ECMA script) and eventually taking some .net classes at a community college to learn about object-oriented coding and all that.

Now I work for the state IT department and have a few side projects going as well. Someday I might actually post one here. I'm more of a designer than a programmer, but I think where I've landed - at least for now - fits my strengths very well. I still wonder what would have happened if I had majored in CS from the beginning, but I would have probably missed out on some fun traveling and great experiences that I had while newspapering.

I was 19 and my sister bought me a computer and I received an AOL CD in the mail. So I got on the net. Then I got a Microsoft VB6 CD. And I learnt to program. I didn't like how difficult the dial-up software was, so I decided to make it easier, and then tried to sell it with Kagi.

Then I got a job taking care of paralysed people in the night, and since I had to stay awake all night in their home (and could not use the net - no flatrates back then), I just fiddled around with Visual Basic all night. So I had a lot of practise, and thought, oh well, I may as well study this computer stuff, seems cool.

So I did.

I can fondly remember changing the terminal background and border color for the first time on my C64:

10 POKE 53280, 0 20 POKE 53281, 0

I can still remember working through the BASIC examples in the manual and magazines. Good times.

hah, this is pretty much the only thing I remember from C64. I did it in one line though: POKE 53280,0:POKE 53281,0

53280, was the inside text area, 53281 was the border area, and 0 was for the color black.

When I was little, my father had a spare computer on which he let the kids install games and play around. I spent a lot of time getting shareware games to run and then playing them. When I was around 9 or 10, my dad (who was an EE) decided that some simple programming might be a practical skill to teach me as I was home schooled at the time. He installed a compiler for Turbo Pascal on the kids' computer and set up a lesson plan. I learned from him for about a year and a half.

When I got older, about 12 years, I pulled out a book on c++ and started teaching myself c/c++. I spent most a large portion of high school trying to get proficient in c++ and ended up coding some very broken games.

I drifted away from computers in high school and more so in college when I began to study other things and made a number of friends who had no interest in computers. I drifted back however when I started playing with Linux and BSD. I managed to get a summer job programming at a the startup of an associate of my father's. So when I graduated from college, I did so with work experience as a programmer, but no other marketable skills. Fortunately, there's not many things I would rather be doing (for a living.)

These days I work full time as a programmer and sysadmin and spend a lot of my free time working on little programs for this and that.

I got a Power Macintosh 6100/60 when I turned 9 in the year 1994. I loved it and spent the next few years of my life learning to do almost anything with the computer. I didn't realize (or know) that "everything you can do with a computer" actually crossed multiple different kinds of disciplines, but I didn't care at the time. I threw myself into games, desktop publishing, image manipulation, HTML, and a host of other things to whatever extent I could get the software to play with it. (If my parents had the money or the inclination to buy me Photoshop at the time I might have ended up as a graphic designer.)

Actually programming seemed almost intimidatingly challenging to me until eighth grade, when I tried to throw myself into C. At that age, I lacked the discipline and attention to detail to keep going, and was (and remain, to a lesser degree) reluctant to ask for help from others. Eventually I went into cultivating other interests until midway through college, when I realized that aside from a continuing interest in philosophy there was nothing I actually liked enough to make a career out of except maybe technology. I was reluctant to pivot halfway through college, but after a year or two of half measures I dove into CS. And here I am--a bit of late bloomer for sure.

I fell in love for the first time in 2nd grade, with an Apple ][e. I was born in 1983. I was let out of the classroom into the hallway to use the arithmetic practice software on the computer, but turned on the computer without the floppy disk in it, and got the ] prompt.

I tried typing some things into it, but all I got back was "SYNTAX ERROR". (Wow! Another word with an X in it!) Someone (probably my bio-dad) told me that that was a programming interface. I forget how, but I found out that there were three books on programming in the school library, one each for PASCAL, LOGO and BASIC. Through trial and error, I discovered that the commands in the BASIC book gave me responses other than "SYNTAX ERROR".

I had a lot of fun on that. Eventually, I convinced my mother to buy the family a computer, and she got a Tandy RLX 1000. I think I first played with GW-BASIC on there. It was cool.

Then I found QBASIC, and was frustrated that my program didn't start when I typed RUN, and kept restarting itself after I finally got it to start.

Later played around with VB for DOS, then Win16. Win95-and then jumped to Perl on Linux, because all my friends were using Linux. (No joke; I started with Red Hat 5.2, but switched to Debian potato, because my friends could only answer questions about Debian.)

Fun times. And yes, I was very, very lonely as a kid.

As far back as I have memory (and I'm told before as well) my family had Macs in the house; our LC575 and Powerbook 150 were staples of my childhood.

I remember one day when I was in my dad's office after school, sitting at his PowerMac 6100/60 ( this would have been about 1998, with me being 8). He was running SoftWindows emulating a 286 running Win3.1, something foreign to me. He showed me around this mysterious "Windows" thing (which wasn't too interesting to me) and then showed me what happened when you quit windows and went into "DOS". A few looks at cd and dir and I was enthralled.

Pre-teen years spend with a string of cast-off 486s and old Macs (and that critically timed slackware 7.1 disc) gave me things to meddle with. Not having broadband Internet until 2007 taught me to delve deep into whatever i had access to, not able to fall prey to flash games and other time wasters.

Basically, being pompous enough to think that I could meddle with things beyond my young age fostered that crucial skill of "I might not know off the top of my head, but I know how it probably works, and I can find out exactly how it works"

My best friend when I was around 7-9 was the son of William & Mary's computer guy. This was back in the 80's when they probably only had 1 computer guy. After swimming I remember going there and being shown the mainframe and tape drives by my friend's dad and just loving it. They also had a computer room that was meant for students but no one used it. So we would go there and checkout games to play on their IBM 386's in monochrome.

This went on for 2 summers if I remember correctly. Then on the third summer I showed up and suddenly the computer lab was full of students. And the damn grad-student guarding it wouldn't let me in. I remember his strange look when this loud mouthed 8 year old demanded to be able to use a computer. But I walked away dejected.

I always had a computer around the house growing up because my parents are teachers and they saw them as learning tools. I went from TRS-80 to Apple-IIc to IBM 286, 386 and on and on. But I really fell in love with these infernal machines in the basement of Small Hall on the W&M campus.

A dusty old Apple II from my uncle. I was a super-nerd at the time and my parents couldn't afford to buy me a computer. This was around '92? Anyway, it came with a manual for Lisa assembler. It had some built-in graphics subroutines which I thought was pretty neat. I just punched in the stuff not really understanding the implications of it all.

Later we got another second-hand computer, an 80386. It was around '94. For the first time I had a relatively decent computer. That thing lasted me until around '98. I spent summers reading BASIC manuals and copies of Byte and Compute from the library.

I also bought a modem for the thing and started BBS'ing and learning programming from other people. My first email address was through my local BBS which had it's own link. This was my favorite time with computers.

My entire family thought that I would "get into computers."

I never did until I was 23. In high school I had gotten into punk and metal and liked playing in bands. After high school I tried to start a label. I thought I could leverage file-sharing where other labels were trying to shut it down. Well that failed in a big way and I was out of work and living off of coffee and toast in a crappy room in some dumpy part of the city (I had taken off from my small town and moved to the city to put myself through college without any money or a place to stay.. that was tough, but I took audio engineering which turned out to be the wrong thing to do). That's when a friend of mine had a cousin at an ISP who was looking for someone to help maintain their hardware and build websites. I downloaded a few manuals on PHP, read a few tutorials, aced the interview and 5 years on I'm loving my job.

I'm now mainly program in Python and Perl and like to read textbooks on maths and computer science on the weekends. Sort of like I used to when I was a geeky kid that everyone picked on. It took a while, but eventually I got there.

Not much education to talk of.

As a kid I loved playing on my dads Atari console thing (the one with the wood panels!) and later he bought a Sinclair ZX81. For a school project we were asked to create our own musical instruments and perform a song - I programmed a song using the BEEP command through trail and error.

After that, we got an Amiga and I pretty much just used it to play games and do some pretty art things.

In around '96 we got a PC with internet access and I started playing around creating batch files in DOS and some basic web pages. I created a pretty popular joke website that was getting quite a bit of traffic but didn't know enough to make the most of it.

In '99 I started an apprenticeship with a company that did EPOS systems and spent a lot of time soldering serial cables. After about 6 months they let me go because I couldn't drive and they wanted someone who could go out and fix machines on site, so I got dumped.

By this point, I was about 18 and I saw a job advert that simply said "Wanted: Internet Guru". I applied and it was basically this guy that had an existing business and wanted to get into this internet thing. I got the job and after a long talk we decided to set up a domain / hosting / web design company. He had some fax spam machine and sent out hundreds of faxes promoting domains at over £100 each (they're now more like £6 in the UK). We were flooded with responses and I spent a few days manually registering domains with our registrar before I realised I could automate most of it.

After about a year, I left and got a job with a small startup as a domain administrator and learnt a lot more about web development. I'm still with that company ten years on even though the founders have cashed out for over £25 million.

I'm now working on my own startup in my free time as I've been dreaming about being free from the rat-race for about 8 years now having seen other people making a mint from their own web startups - I'm finally doing something about it and focusing on my own future rather than making money for other people.

When I was 5, my father taught me to program in BASIC on the family's Apple IIe. This kept me entertained through elementary school and into middle school. I remember trying to learn C in junior high, but none of the tutorials I found were all that helpful. None of them ever mentioned what a compiler was or where I could get one, so I was lost as to how to turn source code into an actual runnable program. Junior high math classes led to more problems to play with (and a programmable calculator to use for playing with them). In high school, I took all of the programming classes offered. It wasn't until about then that I decided to go into computer science -- before that, I'd been most interested in biology.

As I was growing up I vowed I would have nothing to do with computers. My father was a programmer, and I did not want to be like him. I wanted to do stage lighting.

I did a bit of electronics though, and one of my first jobs was helping a stage lighting company with the development of a microprocessor-controlled lighting desk. (This was in the early 80s). I discovered embedded systems and have never really looked back.

An oddity, though: I still don't think of myself as someone who 'works in computers'. I happen to use computers to develop the software and hardware for the embedded systems, but if someone assumes I'm 'in IT', they get put straight very quickly.

I was interested in math and computer science. During some time I was trying to prove P != NP or designing algorithm and learning new languages Prolog, Lisp, Ada, C, and the like.

As I have a steady job, I used to read everything that interested me about algorithm and computers: neural networks, matroids, statistics, machine Learning, data mining, computer vision, cuadratic programming, convex optimization, groebner basis, topology, numeric computations, partial differential equations, some nanotechnology.

Now I read HN and take some leisure. I am expecting some new field to appears just to dive into it. But I am not so young anymore.

DOS made me a console lover. Quake 3 arena made me a script programmer. Geoshell (a windows explorer alternative) made me become obsessed with customization and keyboard shortcuts. Debian made me fall in love with linux - it was easy to build my own router out of an old pentium box. Kubuntu made me a KDE junkie; especially because of KDE's ability to set shortcuts for almost everything. Python made me aware of new ways of thinking about programming (next up lisp/clojure and erlang). The web (2.0) made me getting to HTTP, HTML, CSS and Javascript. Hackernews made me forget Slashdot.

The end.

My brother bought a ZX Spectrum when I was about 8. A couple of years later he let me keep it. I entered code listings from magazines, but never did any real programming myself. Later on (at 16-17) I got an Atari STE. I used GFA Basic to create some simple wireframe 3D cubes and similar simple programs. At about the same time my father got a Compaq 386 laptop, on which I used TurboPascal to create a music database with the worst bubblesort implementation ever devised. I have been programming professionally for 12 years now.

I had a ZX Spectrum with a Multiface One from Romantic Robot. Prior to that I used to write little bits of machine code by hand using the opcode table in the back of the manual, but with the Multiface it made hacking games so much easier.

Then I started rewriting the loaders, writing trainers for the kids at school. Did a couple of demos, got a Sam Coupe then an Amiga, did some more stuff and ended up working for a living in IT before moving into penetration testing and forensics.

Freshman undergrad. So, I'm young.

I've been around computers my entire life. When my father was in college (in the 70s, he's an old fart), he majored in EE/CS (or rather, EE / Math with focus in CS, because CS didn't exist as a separate major in his college). I was raised in Silicon Valley, so I just hold my interest in computers/technology to be a product of both my parents and my environment.

On the other hand, my brother is a musician, and my sister wants to be an artist, so I don't know.

I used to hate computers. Living in the east coast made me want to become a landscape architect so that I could spend more time outside.

When I moved to California I started getting so much sun that I no longer minded sitting at the computer, so I started picking it up. I've always loved designing and building and since a website is never done, the design cycle never ends. Good thing I switched since my thumb was never very green.

I wanted to make useful things inside a computer.

Our school ( a pretty good school) had a programming class but the teacher himself never bothered to show up (!), and classes were about databases and Logo rather than making anything we could use.

I was already hacking DOS - which was needed to make DOS do anything useful - from there, DOS to Unix, Unix to shell scripts, shell scripts to Perl, Perl to Python, some C, and some .net.

When I was about 13, I was given an old PC XT. A neighbor, friend of my grandfather, was very experienced with computers having had a whole bunch of them... he came over to fine-tune the computer for me. He was editing config.sys when he looked at me and told me "you'll be an expert when you understand every single line in this file."

That was some 16 years ago, and I never stopped learning since.

The BBC Micro!

Hurray for the beeb, because at the time it was probably a better platform to learn on than any other machine available, but it was quite expensive.

My real start was 74 series chips though, and from there the TRS-80, which I was allowed to use at a radio shack, it was cheaper than buying logic parts.

Yes! When I was about 6 or 7 I remember spending hours typing in a BASIC program from a book on a BBC Micro at school. It drew a circle on the screen and flashed different colours which I thought was the best thing ever. I couldn't figure out how to save it to disk after running it so I had to type it all out again the next day.

My father worked at Intel pre-Pentium days, and so I grew up around random wafer boards and chips he would bring home to show my brothers and I.

I spent a week when I was in Jr. High figuring out how to network two computers together so I could play Warcraft 2 vs my little brother. It's so darn easy now, it's almost not fair.

I blame Warcraft 2, CompUSA, and AOL for my current tech addiction.

I was always dismantling things as a child. Remote control cars, clocks, lawn mowers, etc. I had a strong desire to just learn how things "worked."

I picked up a Tandy 1000HX second hand when I was probably 9 or 10 years old. I mowed a ton of lawns to get a hard drive for that machine. Shortly thereafter, I received a 486 and a handful of Walnut Creek CDs of various (dated) Linux/BSD distributions. I'm still not sure how those CDs came into my possession, I believe they were passed on to me from a friend.

I spent some time BBSing and learning to write shell scripts. On a couple of BBSes, I read hacking and phreaking text files and started to learn C/Assembly. It was free knowledge as our library was lacking in tech books and I rarely got to go to a bookstore. I also developed a fascination with radio, telephony, and basic electronics.

Three to four years later, the family decided it was time we had a computer (that we could all use). They picked up a 90Mhz box from HP that I promptly installed Linux on and used it to play games, program, and read any sort of documentation I could get my hands on. I also branched out into Perl and started writing small applications with it. We got Internet access about this time and I spent hours saving/absorbing documentation and tutorials from gopher/www/ftp sites.

In my late teens, I took on a job at the local Radio Shack repairing busted electronics. I learned quite a bit there, but electronics these days are disposable, so I had to find other work. I was doing penetration testing on the side for quick cash and ended up getting a contract for the City I lived in. After I finished the job, I got hired on as an intern in the IT department while going through college.

In university, I carried a double major in Computer Science and Pure Mathematics while also attending the local community college for Network Administration. I never finished either degree as I was offered a full time job as Network Administrator at the City. I took the job, quit school, and got married.

During the year or two before I dropped out of school, I learned Ruby with some friends from the ACM at the university and began doing freelance development.

So here I am today, Network Administrator for a small municipality and part time freelance Ruby developer. I'd really like to ditch the ties of my day job and get a full time development job or break out into my own business, but I'm trying to save up some buffer before I decide to take the leap.

BASIC on the Tandy Color II followed by Pascal on the 286. I remember the 286 had a "Turbo" button on the front that would increase the CPU speed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button

Atari 800 XL. Mostly playing tons of games, a little bit of BASIC.

Nice side-effect: I learned English earlier and better than my peers. Being stuck in a game was perfect motivation, dictionary was always at hand (thank you Adventure).

mine is a boring story.

i was raised to be smart. i listened to classical music, read lots of books, and doing well in school was important to me. so, i got put into the local gifted & talented program, where one of the classes was about computer programming. i learned Logo for a year, and that kicked off an interest that hasn't really faded.

Exodus Ultima 3

More specifically, Hex Editor, finding character info in the save files and bumping all your stats up to FF.

Then finding the maps and going nuts adding things and creating entire new cities.

Then playing around with other pieces of various files, and finding yourself being attacked by chests, blocks of water, and the letter W.

My mum taught me BASIC. Ironically, I don't actively program any more...

Commodore vic-20! I still have it, 5Kb RAM teach you how to be efficient

Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Christmas 1982.

Shiny.

FORTRAN IV and IBM/360 :)

The FORTRAN "IV" provided by the IBM 1130, which used 360 components, but the FORTRAN was e.g. lacking logical IF statements.

I did a Bachelors in Commerce starting 1996. Had a nervous breakdown. Recovered more-or-less. Finished degree. Learned basic web design, did that in a half-assed way, loved it. Had several more breakdowns over several years, alternating between menial jobs and illness-induced unemployment for ~10 years. Got into technology blogging in maybe '06. Became obsessed with Web technologies. Went back to university to to a higher diploma in CompSci in Sep. 08. Loved it more than anything I'd done. Stayed on last year to do a Masters. Loved that too. Now staying on to do PhD with fellowship. Work obsessively. Still very much in a learning phase (spent this evening dicking around with Django). Mentally, never been better. No money of course, but fuck it. Programming saved my life, mafuckers :D

We had an Apple //c when I was a little kid, because we were a decade behind the times. I wanted to change what was on the screen. I found BASIC books in the library by accident, while crawling around looking for something else, and the rest is history.

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