I was in the US Navy, and spent an awful lot of time on a deployment hacking away on our ancient laptops to write QBasic programs to automate some of our completely-not-computer-related work. For instance, I wrote a little program to format short text messages in a particular way and write them to a floppy. Then I could hand that floppy to the ship's radioman, and he'd run a program to load the messages and broadcast them over a packet radio to the MARS radio network. Some ham operator in the States would call the recipient, read them the message, transcribe the reply, then radio it back to our ship. I'd pick up a floppy with those replies, bring them back to the medical department where I worked, and print them out.

At the time, the quickest way to contact home was to buy a calling card for the onboard satellite phone, which cost something like $5 per minute to use. The alternative was to write a physical letter, and if you were lucky and the person wrote back immediately, that would be about a one month round trip. My little program was free to use, and shortened the round trip to about one day. I can't exaggerate how happy this made my coworkers and bosses.

One day, a particularly enlightened boss sat me down. "Why do you lie to yourself that you want to be in medicine?" "Uh, because I want to be a doctor?" "Stop kidding yourself. You want to work with computers. We both know it." Whoa. It was like a lightning strike. Well, of course I could go to school for that thing which had been my obsessive hobby since I was tiny! Why hadn't I thought of that?!

And so I got out of the Navy, enrolled in comp sci, and here I am today rattling on about it.

Thank you, QBasic. You weren't running on my beloved Amiga, but you were in the right place and time to kick off a career that I've loved every step of the way.