Comments on: Nobody told me it’s impossible, so I did it.

By: Dale

Dale — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 05:47:55 +0000

My story is similar to yours and others. I had just gotten married and fell very ill after three weeks setting up and running an envelope making machine. So I was fired from my one and only union job. I hunted around and found a job running a TAB machine, then a 1401 IBM computer (4K memory in a computer the size of a VW).
From there I found a job running an IBM 1440 Machine 3rd shift. After a couple of years I got a job running a 360 DOS machine at an auto parts manufacturer. Because it is so boring running a computer all alone I started fooling around writing little programs in Assembler language while running my jobs on the computer. Well I found I liked writing programs and got promoted to programmer. My biggest accomplishment at that company was developing a means to let all of our systems run when the dreaded year of 1970 arrived.
Everyone was so afraid that all systems would stop functioning when the year 2000 came because almost all systems were based upon a two digit year. But they all either forgot or were too young to remember that the same thing happened in 1970 because in the 60′s hard drives were so small that virtually every database used a single digit to represent year since only the government had computers prior to 1960 and most government applications didn’t depend upon dates. But businesses used dates for payroll, orders, billing, inventory, etc.
So I developed a routine that allowed all of our systems to run for an additional five years beyond 1970 while databases were being redesigned and systems rewritten.
So that bullet was dodged.
From there I moved to an insurance company as Programming Manager with a staff of 5 programmers working for me. I went on from there to work for 15 years at a mainframe software company in support and then software development for IBM DOS systems, then as relational database technical support, relational database designer and relational database language teacher, etc. I still remember lugging around a “laptop: computer bigger than a Pullman suitcase with a monochrome screen that was smaller than any hand held DVD player today. Yes, the “good” old days…

All this from a high school dropout without ever having taken a formal computer programming class, only self taught on those long lonely nights while running my computer to print orders, invoices, inventory records, payroll checks, etc.

By: Bubba

Bubba — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 22:43:32 +0000

Ahh… the TI99/4A… with 16K of memoty, a black and white tv, and a cassette tape storage!
I wrote a “Chuck-A-Luck” (Dice betting game) in TIBasic. It had animated rolling dice, and plenty of “sprite” graphics.
I would program all through the night!
And… it only cost me my first marriage!

By: Raymond

Raymond — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 05:29:53 +0000

I guess I’m older than dirt.
I started programing with an Altair 8800 with a blazing fast 2 MHz Intel 8080.
The only language available was 8080 machine code.

By: Michael Rakita

Michael Rakita — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:18:52 +0000

Thanks Gerry, great story! IBM S/360 with APL was before my time but I can imagine all that fun you had playing with it. I agree, software is not a science and passion is a must. We are not in the era of 8kB computers and BASIC anymore but think of all options for someone who starts today. Web programming with Ruby, Python or PHP, Windows programming with C# or VB.NET, iPhone or Mac programming with Objective-C, Xbox programming with XNA etc. I’m a little jealous

By: Gerry Hull

Gerry Hull — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:30:59 +0000

Excellent. I’m 51 and a child of the computer generation. In my school days, there were no such things as computer courses or degrees in Computer Science… at least non that I heard of. I certainly did not want to be a mainframe jock!

- In high school, my math teacher asked if I wanted to be in a “computer club”. I was amazed. Sure, why not? Well, it was an after-school gig… The “computer” was an IBM Selectric Typewriter terminal connected via a 110-baud acoustic coupler and telephone to an IBM System/360… The programming language was APL (A Programming Language), which used a special typeball and the Greek character set. APL was (and remains) a very powerful interpretive lanaguage… very simple to multiply a matrix of a millon by millon dimensions (which would delight us and crash the APL session). I was hooked.

In college we had an HP Mini, with 8kB of core… We did BASIC programming on Teletype terminals. The BASIC interpreter had to be loaded via a punched tape (To load the punched tape, you had to do a boot-strap by entering octal into the front panel switches.)… When the professor got a $25K grant to buy a 16kB memory upgrade to the HP Memory, he forgot the HP and bought 15 or 20 Commodore PETs — 64K machines with built in video and Bill Gates’s BASIC! It was AWESOME.

A later college roommate and I bought the Altair 8800 Kit when it came out! S100 Bus and all that cool stuff… plugging in 2102 1Kbit static RAMs… I was in heaven…

It’s 30 years later and I’m still writing code as an individual contributor… many products shipped, lots of success stories… VB.Net is my favorite language, with C# a close second. On Linux, PHP and Ruby.

Have PASSION for programming and you will go places. Software is an ART, not a science. Learn by doing — get a college degree for the the science, but let the PASSION for programming live on.

By: Dinis Cruz

Dinis Cruz — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:38:39 +0000

I think you are missing the point here , learning how to program this way is the ONLY way to really becoming a great programmer

Doing those tasks by hand is a very important first step since that is what gave you a very solid understanding of how programming works, and more importantly it allowed you to start visualizing your program in your head.

By: Michael Wales

Michael Wales — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:44:19 +0000

Haha, sounds just like me. I was bored in school (the curriculum was years behind my knowledge level) and would fill sheets and sheets of paper with code, waiting to get home and test. Good times.

By: Steve Merrick

Steve Merrick — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:56:44 +0000

Like many correspondents here, I started programming in much the same way as you describe. Once we’ve established motivation, which I agree is the most important thing, we need to consider how to continue. It took me a long time to pick up the elements of software engineering/craftsmanship, but without them, I would be a Bad Programmer. Learning how to do the job properly matters; enthusiasm alone isn’t enough.

By: DJ

DJ — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:46:38 +0000

Pretty much the same story. Took programming course in BASIC at pretty much the first computer shop in our town in mid-80 during school holiday.

I remember the course was 8:30-10:00 in the morning and my brother and I were pounding on the door at 7:30 waking up the owner/instructor who lived there to let us in so we could spent some time on the computer. There were other courses after ours, so we only got access to computer during those short hours 3x a week.

By: Serkan

Serkan — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:05:33 +0000

Same story here, more or less. I’ve started with BASIC too, when my brother bought the book but got bored easily. So I’ve picked it up, and read it several times, programmed my first Tetris game, and never stopped programming since then. It was a lot of fun.

But the problem is, and it also gets asked in forums from time to time, what is the BASIC for modern times, that gives the same satisfaction and excitement?