How I got started programming
In the summer of 1987, when I was 7 years old, my uncle gave my family a computer. It was a Commodore 64. He also gave us a lot of programming magazines. These magazines had full programs ready for use, all we had to do was type them in. My brother did most of that kind of thing, he was 15 at the time.
I knew how to enter a program and load and run a program almost instantly. Programming, on the other hand came very slowly. I was constructing my own programs by the age of 8. I started to work on a Monopoly program, but it never came into fruition. I got to the point where the board would be displayed and the dice would roll random numbers, but never got any further.
I wrote other little programs, most of which I cannot recall any more. I do recall fixing my brother’s program once. He was enrolled in a computer course at a local college. He was writing a small program that rolled a die, but the die always rolled in the same sequence. He forgot one line of code that gave the random number generator a seed. A random number generator needs a seed, normally set to the time, to generate different results each time the program is run.
In late 1992, my parents purchased an AST 486DX computer. It cost over $2000, a big change from today’s computer prices. I quickly found the program to run custom programs and off I went to create more programs, most of which I do not recall, but still have backups of somewhere. Hey, 16 years is a long time and things get shuffled around too much to keep up.
That is, in a nutshell, how I got started programming. When I started, I knew that was my calling. I am thrilled to have a programming job now. It took me a while, but here I am.
One of the things I love about computer programming is that it is an always changing field. There is always something new to learn, every day. I would just like to thank my uncle for showing me the door. Without that, I would probably be in a completely different field of work.
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