Breaking computers taught me to build them

Our math teacher in UK high school c.1976 asked us if anyone want to join him for an adult education programming class being taught by the local university (Durham), and a bunch of us did. This was batch mode (punched card) PL/1 programming - submit job to operator and an hour later get a fanfold printout of the result. A couple of us (incl. me) had parents that worked at the University, and got the computer dept. to agree to allow us high school kids to go in on weekends etc to use the Unix system (online access) there, after the initial adult education class had ended. We spent a lot of time there, taught ourselves to program in C, and caused some amount of trouble by messing with the unix system - brute force password cracking, and on one occasion accidentally deleting the /etc/passwd file, which luckily they had backed up - they were surprisingly tolerant of all this and didn't kick us out!

In March 1978 the first issue of "Personal Computer World" magazine came out, featuring the just released NASCOM-1 kit computer on the front cover. I'd just inherited 200 UKP from my grandmother, so sent it off and got myself a kit. This was a 1 MHz Z-80 system that came with 2 KB of memory (1KB for user, 1KB for system), and a built-in monitor program that let you enter programs as hex machine code. The computer itself came as bare board, bag of components to solder, and no case. It used a TV for display and cassette recorder for program/data storage. You'd hand assemble your program on paper, then enter the codes and run it. There wasn't a whole lot you could do in 1KB, but I remember coding things like a hangman game, and memorizing the op-codes well enough to program short things directly in hex.

I then went to college, taking Math & Comp Sci, graduating in 1982, and lucking into a dream job at Acorn Computers, which started my career as developer.

I was 9 when I first moved to the US. I couldn't speak English so the teacher stuck me in front of the classroom computer. It was one of those monochrome all-in-one console things that must have been from the 80's and the only thing on there was Q-basic. To pass the time I followed the tutorials to create my own MUD. And that's how I learned BASIC before English.

In middle school my parents got me a graphing calculator for Algebra. Couldn't figure out a damn thing about how to write programs on it, and I didn't really have much computer or internet access at home, but I was curious.

In the school computer lab I did some searching and found a programming guide for that model of calculator on some university website. While printing out my assignment I also secretly printed out the guide and hid it under the other papers (not supposed to be wasting ink on a personal print job). Took it home and was glued to it for months.

Eventually I was able to program the game Snake. It ran slow as hell, but it ran.

My family got a computer when I was in 3rd grade (1994-ish?) and I was immediately obsessed. A year or two went by of me just clicking every button I could find on the computer to see what happened, most of which was nothing. Eventually the idea of making my own programs hit me. I remember asking every adult I could how to "build programs". Nobody knew or at least nobody took me seriously. Eventually a family friend, who happened to be a Navy Admiral and at one point on the joint chiefs of staff, actually responded affirmatively. He showed me a small program he had written for his son that mimicked some air traffic and had callsigns on the airplanes like "Goose" and "Maverick". He sent me home with a copy of QBasic on a 3.5" floppy and a BASIC programming book. It was all downhill from there.

In 6th grade i stole my teachers car to go get a girl some lemon heads...this was just the latest such incident so my teachers said I had to stand in the corner for the rest of the year; but my computer teacher Ms. Melton said I could spend the time in the computer lab and she started teaching me JS. Then on work study day she sent me to her friends at a local ISP and they gave me an internship etc... etc... 30 years later and I am a software eng.

When I was around 4, my dad, an aerospace engineer, passed down his old Windows 95 computer to us. I loved rummaging through C:\Windows and finding all the little "hidden" utilities, it was like a toybox. When I was around 6, he brought home a binder of programming lessons and a worn copy of "Sams' Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours" from work and started going through them with me. Eventually I moved on to reading every computer-related book I could get my hands on in the public library's small, very out-of-date collection.

I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten the early start that I did. I'd be a completely different person without that.

My grandfather saw that computers were going to be important. So, he got me a Commodore64. Inflation adjusted, that was probably a $600 gift for an 8 year old. I tried copying the code from the magazines. But, it didn't click until that same grandfather sent me to a summer camp that was mostly sports, but also had a class in LOGO (TurtleDraw). Thanks, Grandpa!

In high school, the IT guy got bored and started a class teaching Pascal. The whole class timeshared a Linux 386 via amber Wyse terminals. He also had a follow-on class that taught C. But, his attitude was "If you made it through the first class and came back, you're cool. Here's a book on C and a compiler. Go make up your own assignments and I'll be busy teaching Pascal to the new kids over there." I've been programming C/C++ for over 25 years now. Thanks, IT Guy!

My Dad was a software developer in the UK with Honeywell in the 1960s and after a stint with Wang (yes, I know, ha ha) went independent. As a result we had a variety of Wang minis in the house in the mid-70s when I was a toddler, which must have been fairly unusual. I learnt to write on green-banded continuous stationery!

Thereafter it was the more conventional British route into computing via Clive Sinclair's cheap but, er, cheap, ZX81 for me... but those minis lit the fuse.

I tinkered much like OP, and went on to do a professional trade course in PC building and maintenance when I was like fifteen. I also built websites. However, I didn't follow through and studied business management in college. It was only in my late 20's when I learned proper programming and developed a love for computer science with Harvard's CS50. I went on to do a masters in software engineering at Harvard Extension, and now I'm doing the OMSCS at Georgia Tech. Unlike OP it took me a while to connect with my love for computers. It's been a very haphazard journey!

Mom was a COBOL programmer. She saw the direction things were headed with computing. The family got an Apple //c for Christmas in 1984. In the spring, she enrolled me in a six week one night a week course for computer programming at the local high school. We learned BASIC on Apple ][ e.

I took the knowledge and ran with it. Didn’t take long to want more, found a game programming book using assembly - but since I didn’t have an assembler, I entered machine code directly. That kept be engaged for years.

For me is was work. First DOS, then Win 3. Years later, when the CEO of the company I worked for arranged for a really good Dell computer discount with financing, many of my co-workers purchased them, mostly for their kids. Many of those kids broke these machines (Most of them had Win ME) and I became the IT guy. I already had a PC for several years, which I broke a few times and had to gather info to make repairs, so I was glad to help and learned a ton of new things about computers. A shout out to Maximum PC Magazine, who had a wealth of info every month. Sad to see it's gone.

My earliest "programming" attempts were when I was seven years old. I would delete lines of basic from a simple game called Dungeon on our Commodore Pet to see what would happen. Obviously most of the time it just broke, but I did get some interesting effects, such as the dungeon becoming one big room instead of rooms and passages, or all the monsters becoming the same type. Those changes fascinated me and began an interest in learning more about basic so I could understand better why these things were happening, and off I went from there.

(Hey, neat, here's a browser based version of the game: https://www.commodoregames.net/CommodorePET/Dungeon-86.html)

A bit adjacent, but I’ve spent some free time the last couple of weeks tearing down and rebuilding a cuckoo clock. I’ve been delighted learning the mechanics of the bellows, the bird, and just clock movements in general.

There’s a great value to curiosity, and I think it’s incredibly important that we nurture it in our society.

We bought a 386 SX, and I figured out how to change directories and run random programs. No documentation, no internet of course, just randomly typing in commands to see what happened. That led me to QBASIC, which led me to modifying GORILLAS.BAS. Then one day I was exploring a file called TELIX.EXE, and realized it had something to do with dialing phone numbers. I asked the guy at the counter of Radio Shack (!) what it could be, and he gave me vague instructions about what to do next. I plugged a phone cord into the back of the computer and started using BBSs, which led to MUDs, which led to scripting, drawing in ANSI graphics, and ultimately to programming and design, which have been my careers.

This is very true and sadly missing in this era of getting things that "just work". I must have lost several dozen hours trying to get audio working on an ancient RH Linux installation in the late 90s but all the stuff I did set me up for troubleshooting and working things out in a way that no "just works" setup could ever have.

I think it's very useful to work with barely working outdated systems early in ones education. They can teach you a lot which and the knowledge will compound very quickly.

My start was a mix of Khan Academy and a laptop with a broken screen.

My mom's computer screen broke when it got dropped on the ground, but it still had a working VGA port. So, she reached out to someone in our congregation who did sysadmin work who installed Ubuntu 12.04 on it. He also helped get a LAMP stack installed locally, and set up a server that I could deploy code to. It was funny since there was little 10 year old me lugging around a chunky monitor with this laptop everywhere I went.

I was homeschooled, so I got an hour of computer time every day as long as I was doing something productive. The Khan Academy CS course had just been released, so my dad helped me get started, and I consumed those tutorials! I also got to check out other people's projects and tweak random numbers to see what happened. The KA community is incredible, since you can comment on others' programs and they're pretty responsive.

Another fun thing was doing Minecraft modding (shout out to bedrock miners' tutorials!). To this day I'm shocked that my 12 year old self was writing java code like that, but I suppose I was mainly just copying and pasting code, lol.

There's so many little projects in various languages I did (tried and failed to make an android app, tried to make a couple JS games but was bad at finishing stuff, made SVN for Khan Academy, read some random books on clojure and elixir, started but never completed an inventory management system for my aunt). But, when I think back, Khan Academy on that old laptop really kicked it off.

A bit of background: I grew up in Brazil between the years transitioning from full protectionism (import substitution) to a more freeing trade economy.

When I was around 9 I discovered that the videogame my dad had, a Gradiente Expert, could boot into some kind of BASIC REPL. The machine was a clone of the MSX re-branded in the Brazilian market to be allowed within the import substitution policy.

I had barely learnt to read but I got very, very excited seeing the command line pop-up. My dad worked in the telecom industry, and I had seen him many times working on a command line. I flipped through the manual and eventually figured out how to make the computer write characters on the screen.

From then on I spent years obsessed with learning how to program on the MSX, then on the 386 running MS-DOS at home, eventually Win95 appeared, and since my dad worked in telecom we were some of the first ones I knew to get an internet connection.

On the web I learnt HTML, CGI, then ASP, and later PHP. I think I was about 12-13 when I tried to learn C/C++ for modding games, some 3D modeling, etc., eventually culminating with me getting a job as an intern/youth apprentice scheme at 15-16 to help programming a factory's intranet systems to comply with ISO9001.

My dad never really pushed me to work with computers or anything, I think I was just a very curious kid who loved science, and also tinkering and building stuff. I realised only later in my 30s how it all connected, building with coding was probably immensely satisfying for me as a kid, very fast feedback on what works or not, many puzzles to solve, and virtually free of expenses that I couldn't afford.

Using an HP 3000 at a local college via teletype terminal during summer gifted & talented program.

The school eventually got some TRS-80s, and I did a summer program where we passed an Apple ][ off as a robotics program, and I mowed grass summers and eventually bought a Commodore Vic-20 and later a TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1 (in retrospect, should have waited and gotten the Model 100).

Got Inman's book on Apple Machine Language, and a couple of other programming books, and lots of magazines (including one which had the ad "We See Farther" ad: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_11970... ) and typed in lots of program listings for games and so forth, and used Scripsit for my senior term paper.

Bought a 128K Mac and pretty much one of everything in the store, then switched to Windows 'cause I wanted a portable device, until the NCR-3125 and Go Corp.'s PenPoint came out --- paired that w/ a NeXT Cube which got me through college and was pretty much the high-water mark of my graphical computing experience.

I had a computer in my bedroom and I wanted to make it efficient so I went into /system32 and started deleting every file that didn’t seem useful

Games and HTML.

I loved playing computer games when I was young, and in school, they were also teaching us HTML to make cool webpages. I was naturally curious so I started learning things on my own by reading computer books.

In parallel I loved gaming so much I wanted to make my own games. I started making small stuff on flash after reading online and learned a little bit of ActionScript.

That made me realize that coding is really hard to learn on my own (for my dumb brain) so I thought to check my local computer institutes for basic courses. Found a small coaching center. Instead of coding, they convinced me that I needed to learn hardware first and impressed a teenage kid by showing simple tricks like breaking windows password, upgrading hardware, etc.

So I did that course for 6 months and to my surprise I enjoyed it as well and learned a lot on my own too. Finally, I started building computers for a living and started a small home-computer repair venture with my friend (during college).

I was eight years old, and wanted to make a Pokemon fan site, so I purchased a book to learn HTML, and used "view source" on every website I could find. I ended up copying and pasting some Javascript that I wouldn't be able to understand for another 6 years.

At fourteen I became interested in "serious" programming and bought a copy of Visual Studio along with a C++ book. I was mostly interested because I read online that C++ was challenging.

At seventeen I took an interest in Linux, and started using that full time realizing I could have saved myself from spending literally all my money by using an open source C++ compiler.

At 21 I finally found myself in a Computer Science undergraduate department.

Somewhere along the way I started building PCs, but my interest was always more on the software side than the hardware side.

I was obsessed with science fiction when I was a kid, and math and computers in particular. I saved up my pocket money to buy a TRS-80 Color Computer II, and learned to program in BASIC over the summer holidays. Later I learned 6809 Assembly, and Color Forth on the same machine.

I know linux because I ordered a mandrake CD and put it on my windows computer in the 90s, nothing worked...I had the most insane experience, I'd go to high school, go online, have to write out how to do everything (including code) on paper, take it home, make progress, same same daily for some time, few days maybe a week I guess. I'm not sure why exactly it was easier to make mandrake work vs go back to windows, I think because of the file format and I didn't understand drive formatting or something. I basically just spent my whole childhood...er..life? fixing broken computers and breaking computers then fixing them...

I started programming at the age of 10 on a commodore computer. Did not have any friends or family members in the field. A lot of hacking, experimentation, and continual improvement. I still take the same approach today.

I am a big believer that for many of us, curiosity, a desire to learn, and no fear of failure are key to learning. I happen to be work in the industry full time, however I apply the same skillset towards art, cooking, welding/fabrication. The ability to analyze and problem solve is really what it is about.

'Learn to learn' is the advice I give anyone entering the field, and oh yeah, drop the ego as that tends to hold you back from your potential; we are are continually learning...

I owe my developer career to my mother giving me her old laptop sometime in late 90s. With the condition that if I break it, I fix it. Helped me through the process of installing Windows 3.11 for the first time, and then I was largely on my own.

I was in second or third grade, I think. Highlights include figuring out that if you prevented most of the drivers from loading, it was just possible to run Doom with 4MB of RAM. And installing Windows 95 from a shopping bag full of floppy discs (literally, a bag), and deciding that while it was cool to have running, the resulting 4 or 5 MB of free disk space was not conducive to proper computing.

I thought my mom decided for reasons lost to me that I should have a computer, and bought one for me in 1982 or so, but according to her it was entirely my idea. No clue what prompted it. Perhaps reading science fiction.

Precisely zero influences on this from family.

My parents moved home just before Christmas, and we had to spend a lot of money on short notice replacing windows, etc.

As a result of low cash for the first time ever my parents bought my sisters and I a shared present - A Sinclair ZX Spectrum, 48k.

The computer came with 10-12 casette-tapes, a tape recorder, bundle of manuals and a joystick. Unfortunately the tape-recorder didn't work so we couldn't load any of the games.

I spent Christmas reading the BASIC manual, and my sisters spent it being disappointed.

I wrote about this here, in the past in a little more detail:

https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming

As a latch key kid I had nothing but me time. So I hit up BBSs and found out about and downloaded warez. But to play them on our family computer I had to upgrade the DOS to 5.0 (also warez). So I learned how to upgrade the OS/play/downgrade the OS before my parents came home. Computer skills, IT migration skills (under high pressure time constraints), and time management. Weekend time was spent with mom, at her office while she worked and I played on Rogue and Trek on the VAX or skated the mini ramp they had in the parking lot for employees.

Having grown up in the same era, not being afraid of breaking things was crucial. I remember doing roughly the same things - being bored in class and going through the entire start menu.

I remember adults being very apprehensive about messing about with things. I didn't have the same(perhaps learned) aversion to playing with the settings of something. To some degree, I wonder if this was a learned behavior from an earlier era where it was _much_ harder to just reset something and try again.

At around age 12 took an after school class in programming BASIC on TRS-80 computers. My dad let me use his dial up account at the university where he worked. 300 baud with an acoustic coupler modem and an ADM 3a terminal (one of the first “work from home” setups; certainly none of my friends had anything like that at their houses). Found the colossal cave game and started digging in to how it was programmed.

Later in early high school used paper route money to buy a TI-99/4a. Learned more BASIC and then assembly language on that.

Typing in listings from magazines for my 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Debugging them (there were almost always misprints or genuine coding mistakes) taught me a lot.

TI-83

I still think these things (especially the TI-89) are really underrated. They have a battery life measured in months to years and can do calculus symbolically.

My father is a retired mechanical engineer. Back in the early 1980s he was working on some engine designs and found that the programmable calculators he was using just weren't up to the task of grinding out the mechanical advantage curves he was attempting to characterize. So first he got a Tandy Pocket Computer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_Pocket_Computer) and later a full-fat TRS-80 (the Model 16, the most expensive and powerful model they sold at the time, and part of the Model II line which was incompatible with the TRS-80s most people are familiar with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_II), took a couple of college courses on programming, and wrote an engine simulator in BASIC replete with a graphical display that animated the position of the piston and crankshaft and plotted the curve on-screen.

I mean, the man is a stone-cold genius. Anything he needed to know how to do, he would bro down and learn it, often in a very short time. Even though I didn't understand half of what he was trying to do back then, it was a wonder to young me, especially since it came about by merely feeding instructions into the machine.

Eventually, for my fifth birthday, he went down to Crazy Eddie's and got me a Commodore VIC-20, so I would keep my grubby mitts off his expensive professional equipment. I then began writing my own BASIC programs, to make the PETSCII birds from the tutorial manual fly according to my own plan and so forth. The love of computing had been planted. And here I am. That five-year-old kid, awestruck by having an electronic genie I can type my wishes to and see them granted, is still in there somewhere. The grind of Scrum, meetings, deadlines, legacy code, and the looming spectre of "vibe coding" turning my work and passion into a triviality haven't snuffed the flame yet.

HeathKit Programmable Calculator, circa 1974 or so.

Lots of messing around with things that go bang; Then, I attended a redneck tech school, where I learned Electronic Design, Machine Code and "microprocessors" (what they called CPUs, back then). That was around '82-'83.

All the rest has been seminars, OJT, and just plain ol' messing around at home.

Neopets, created an account around 2nd grade.

Eventually learned HTML to spruce up my profile.

Then discovered running a “mall” to earn Neopoints and so I handcrafted a banner in MS Paint and manually mapped pixels for turning it into a link map

Then had my neopoints stolen by a fake website, tried to recreate fake website for myself, leading to… CTFs, hacking & cybersecurity

getting a bench engineer job fixing PCs (286/ 386) made PCs in to a hobby. it's was always (90%) the capacitors,

I'd fix PC's then play around with them - i still remember how badly incompatible conner and seagate HDDs where, that tried to share the same IDE cable

Asked for an Atari 2600 for Christmas, got a Commodore VIC-20 instead. Learned BASIC. Got the Programmer's Reference Guide and learned "machine code", learning by assembling by hand, POKEing it into memory, and SYSing to run it.

That book literally changed my life.

Counter-Strike. I learned basic HTML for a clan web page, then PHP to run the forums. I eventually wanted to host my own server, so I learned Linux back then too. Probably 25 years ago.

Building an S-100 system from kits. Soldering all of the edge connectors to the IMSAI motherboard taught me to solder and the power supply taught me to mistrust big electrolytic caps.

The feeling of configuring my new shiny laptop is pretty similar to the feeling of learning to use my first logarithmic ruler. But it all started with my granny's abacus.

mIRC Scripting Language programming.

"BASIC Computer Games" by David H. Ahl

Note: title is currently borked, it should be

> How breaking computers taught me to build them....

but it is

> Taught me to build them...