I give my mom credit. In the 80's she found summer classes for me where I could learn about programming.
To this day I'm not sure if she was responding to an interest I expressed, or if she planted the interest in my mind. However, for more than 30 years people have been paying me to stare at computer screens all day.
I give my mom credit. In the 80’s she found summer classes for me where I could learn about programming.
In the early 80s we we NOT well off. However, our entire household chose to go without christmas (and went into debt) to buy a Commodore 64 computer. It allowed me to experiment, make mistakes, and learn in a safe environment. When I started using computers in school was already very comfortable with it. When I started in the working world, I was not only comfortable, but highly knowledgeable about using and fixing computers.
My sibling and I are both successful IT professionals. I absolutely attribute having that computer (even a very under powered c64) in the house growing up.
That's the fun thing about some of the older systems. Program names were limited to eight or ten characters so you had to get creative with naming within a library (basically the equal of a folder on AS/360 ... AS/400 systems) if it got large.
My mom supported me all the time, while I was failing first my Electrical Engineering, then my Environmental Science degree.
She still trusted I would make it!
And now I am better off than her and my dad, and can financially support my partner's dreams, simply by doing what I did for fun while I was failing my studies.
My mom couldn't have known that, and she doesn't fully understand why I make so much money doing this, but she always believed in me.
we had to put signs up around one office I worked at warning when clients would be dropping by, because half of the back office worked in pajamas most days
I had a solar-powered pocket calculator with a membrane once. Credit-card-sized. You can tell I was a nerd because I owned three pocket calculators at the same time.
The 400 if you acidentally stepped on it it'd flip back and bark your shin, you'd fall over and put your foot through it. that's why there's so few today.