I started somewhere between 1992 and 1993 on an overpaid 80286, with 20 MiB of HD and 4 MiB RAM (if I recall correctly) that my mom bought us for 1500000 Italian lire.
I remember the cost because it was an incredibly expensive gift for our poor finances, unmatched (in proportion to our wealth back then) by any other object I've ever bought since, not even cars.
A few years later I learnt what 80386 were and that I could not install Linux on my PC, despite being the only guy among my peers to know what Linux was.
Anyway, my first programing language was QBASIC: I started hacking GORILLA.BAS.
That is: I broke it by error and my little brother cried loudly until I managed to fix it (took a few days. I didn't even know English... I only had a English-Italian dictionary). A great life lesson: no project manager ever managed to match that peer pressure.
Later I've found a book about BASIC forgotten in the library of a friend. He lended me it for a while so that I did a photocopy. That was my first programming book ever.
Later at school I learnt Pascal. I loved it. But Turbo Pascal 3.0 was so slow on my 286, that when my friends called me by phone for help about homeworks they where able to tell me if the program was working right, before my 286 had reached the linking phase! They used to laugh at that... and actually, I was aware of the deep (and sad) irony..
At the beginning 1998 I learnt about the Internet and got my first mail at school, and few months later a cool friend of mine gifted me his old 486 so I was able to first try Linux and learnt how to build web sites.
To my mom, my brother and to this friend I owe... what I am now.
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I started somewhere between 1992 and 1993 on an overpaid 80286, with 20 MiB of HD and 4 MiB RAM (if I recall correctly) that my mom bought us for 1500000 Italian lire.
I remember the cost because it was an incredibly expensive gift for our poor finances, unmatched (in proportion to our wealth back then) by any other object I've ever bought since, not even cars.
A few years later I learnt what 80386 were and that I could not install Linux on my PC, despite being the only guy among my peers to know what Linux was.
Anyway, my first programing language was QBASIC: I started hacking GORILLA.BAS.
That is: I broke it by error and my little brother cried loudly until I managed to fix it (took a few days. I didn't even know English... I only had a English-Italian dictionary).
A great life lesson: no project manager ever managed to match that peer pressure.
Later I've found a book about BASIC forgotten in the library of a friend.
He lended me it for a while so that I did a photocopy.
That was my first programming book ever.
Later at school I learnt Pascal. I loved it.
But Turbo Pascal 3.0 was so slow on my 286, that when my friends called me by phone for help about homeworks they where able to tell me if the program was working right, before my 286 had reached the linking phase!
They used to laugh at that... and actually, I was aware of the deep (and sad) irony..
At the beginning 1998 I learnt about the Internet and got my first mail at school, and few months later a cool friend of mine gifted me his old 486 so I was able to first try Linux and learnt how to build web sites.
To my mom, my brother and to this friend I owe... what I am now.