Ask HN: What got you interested in programming/building/hacking?

My case was weird, I always wanted to have a computer. When I was 7 I got to see computer first time, saw few things in basic and logo at school (not even elementary) totally fascinated me. Love it, like wow I type using keyboard and it shows on computer thats so amazing. I would hypothesize that each key must have some sort of signal/signature that makes computer identify them. I still remember LET A=5 LET B=6 LET C=A+B and then C's value would be 11. Teacher taught us to draw rectangle in logo. After that when I was 11 I got my hands on MS visual c++ 2006 or smthng, totally loved it. Didnt go as far as pointers but had pretty much covered all that and Totally loved it. Sister would code in C++ and I was amazed to see how similar they were (didnt knew c++ was super set to C) Wanted to learn java php js by 12-13 years of age. Started using ubuntu 12.04 hahaha. Linux commandline was very good different from cmd and totally awesome. Started reading hacking books and realised this is what I want to do. Currently I am still learning, I aint the sharpest tool but I can atleast think in computer terms.

I was curious as a child to know how on earth that these programs did what they did. You ran them and they did something useful, and a human made them. I was just amazed at how they could do different things on the same machine. The same machine could run a game, a calculator, or something else without you having to change it. They all ran. How is this possible. I spent some time opening them with EDIT on DOS and I gleaned a few strings and words.

I even created a text file and changed its extension to .COM and .EXE and tried to run it. I'm not sure what I expected but I expected it to do something and it didn't, it wasn't a valid application , so I wanted to learn how to make a valid one.

I was a child and started learning BASIC. Mainly going through the help, instruction by instruction. Typing in snippets from the help and running them, then changing things, seeing what broke and trying to figure out failure patterns and find causality. It may not have been the best strategy but I was less than 9 in 96 and we didn't have Internet. I was able to ask my older brother questions though.

It was just fascinating. The first program I was really proud of was a geography one. I used to look up countries in dictionaries.

I got the idea that I could write a program that gave you all information. So I entered all the countries painstakingly. The data was of course part of the program.

The program takes the country name, in capital letters or it didn't work, and it returns the details(population, surface area, capital).

It was not much and I recall trying to find "users" in my family members. "Say you're curious about Bolivia and want to know more... What do you do?"

Answer: I look it up in the dictionary.

Me: or you run this program and you type the country name in capital letters and it gives you all the information you need.

I was hooked. Seeing those games and tools do what they did, I wanted to learn to build things that were so useful.

Not meaning to hijack your question, but if anyone has ideas on what might get today's youth interested in hacking (e.g. certain movies, books, twitch streaming), I would love to hear some thoughts.

As a kid, I loved the idea of making games. My sister used to draw little characters and I'd try to make it into a game.

For me it was;

- Lego

- Which led to Lego mechanics

- Which led to mechanical engineering

- Which led to manufacturing

- Which led to automation

- Which led to programming

It's a long but surprisingly common path I've found...

There was a cartoon show in the 90's where the characters learned rudimentary BASIC programming, and it blew my mind that you could make a computer do what you wanted by typing a few commands. Later on, it was wanting to make video games that completely hooked me on.

I’m not. I just do it for the (Relatively) easy income.

Some game (dont remember which) kept leaving weird text files on my desktop. Turns out they were Java stack traces.

I was in 10th grade when the social network came out. I was inspired and really wanted to make my own facebook.

Watching Wargames and Tron as a child.

Apple ][, PDP-8/10/11

My dad.