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Discussion on: How Did You Start Coding?

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Jason Gade • Edited

When my dad studied "data processing" in community college in the 1980s, I read his books on FORTRAN and BASIC and RPG2 and COBOL and other stuff. Not much other than FORTRAN or BASIC made much sense.

He brought home ASCII printouts of Snoopy and of nudes and faces and stuff like that.

He took me to the school a couple of times and that was when I first played with an Apple ][. I played a couple of games, but playing with BASIC was the best thing, because I could make the computer do what I wanted it to. Kind of. I also took a kids course at that community college which let me do things like


10 PRINT "JASON"
20 GOTO 10

Eventually we got a Commodore 64, monitor, and printer for our home (no mass storage), and a subscription to Compute!'s Gazette magazine.

Despite being a voracious reader and a lover of computer languages, I have never really progressed much further than the beginner stage. Admittedly most of my interest is in lower-level system-type stuff since I'm more of a hardware guy.