On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 3:43 AM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> 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) When I was 12 (13?) my math teacher got a local college to lend us an ASR-33 teletype and a 100 baud modem connected to a customized HP-3000 timesharing minicomputer. After that the story is pretty much the same as above. Started writing simple BASIC programs, played lunar lander and wanted to understand it better so learned Newtownian mechanics, simple ballistics, trigonometry. Started writing simple basic programs and kept wanting to learn more. Eventually we started using enough resources the college wanted to be paid for it so my fellow proto-hackers raised enough money to pay monthly rental on the ASR-33, a leased telephone line, and bought time on the computer. By the time I got to High School I got a job teaching high school teachers about programming, took an APL class at the local community college (on an IBM mainframe but still interactive). By the time I got to college I was good enough to be tutoring programming and annoying the TAs by correcting them in labs - telling them to use the Burroughs B6700 "read-modify-write" instruction to do swaps in sorts rather than T := A; A := B; B := T; ( A := readlock(A,B) if I recall correctly ) -- Charles
