On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 11:13:48PM +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote: > This list contains a large number of self-taught programmers. How did > you get started, and how did you get to a moderate level of skill? (If > you want to talk about what happened after that, great, but I am more > interested in the first two stages)
I'm not much of a programmer, but got suckered in by the mystique from early and late science fiction. On the other side of the Iron Curtain in the 1970s the actual computers were scarce, but their artifacts (punched dead tree) did surface occasionally. My first exposure to actual devices was 1980 sharp, mostly by way of friends lucky (and rich) enough to own Sinclair ZX80/81, Apples, CP/Ms, then PCs, early SGI Indigo boxes and so on. The first machine I owned (and paid for myself) was the Amstrad CPC-464 (monochrome, great graphics for exploring cellular automata), and then Amiga 2000. *nix henceforth. I must admit I prefered to read more about the history and theory than actually spending much time on actual hacking. Which is probably why I'm mostly doing system/network administration, and not development. Can't stand coding for any length, it bores me to tears for some reason. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
