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Comment by throwaway167 | Hacker News Reader

Everyone's doing when I was 16.

When I was 16 I read magazines about computers I couldn't afford, read Pascal code from a book that I wrote out in hand with pencil as I only had 2 hours time with a classroom computer each week, and almost died when getting a graphing calculator that could be programmed.

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When I was 16, I spent way too much time playing Leagues of Legends. My life would be so much easier now if I started practising what I do now that early!

God that takes me back. Spent many hours writing programs on some cheap Casio and then for Christmas one year (15 or 16 years old) I received an HP 48s and it was a whole new world. Good times.

When I was 16 I wrote games on my TI-86 in TI Basic to play during school, and learned VBA to make silly desktop apps (one would open a bunch of internet browsers to a youtube video of mine- a montage of Call of Duty clips that I wanted more views on).

My dad worked for IBM in the software group but he was able to get decomissioned (usually broken) Thinkpads for me to tinker with.

This is actually how I started my MSP company in the early 2000s. I was selling webspace hosted on Thinkpads with broken displays running Debian Woody (and Sarge) in a ventilated book shelf in my room.

Good times

Woody was my first Debian, I think directly after I switched from Mandrake.

I was...17, I think.

When I was 16 I was coasting to the State Science Fair on a fishing game I'd written two years earlier. Taught myself programming with the GW Basic language book. Totally worth it because I got to miss most of a day of class each for the county and regional fairs, and two for state.

I had a Commodore 64 and could dial long distance for free using hacked Sprint codes. For a brief moment in time, my BBS had the best collection of cracked C64 games in town. But then I slacked for a few months and the game passed me by.

Who's Pascal?

<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pascal_(programmi...>

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