I've been interested in computers since I was introduced to them in the 3rd grade. I was first taught LOGO on Apple IIe's and drew pictures with the "turtle". Then I learned BASIC. My parents got me a Commodore 64 at home, but I didn't do much except play games on it. I did type in a few BASIC listings for games found in magazines (!), but the code was long, and it was tedious and error prone typing it all in. Then around 7th grade, I got my first PC. It was an Epson brand 8088 PC. I learned MS-DOS and pirated games. A few years later, I got a generic 386SX PC running Windows 3.0 and a modem. More pirating of games and BBSing ensued.
I didn't learn to really code until 11th grade (early 90's). My high school informed us of an extracurricular programming class offered on Saturdays at a local occupational center/adult school. I didn't know it yet, but that class would singularly influence the rest of my schooling and career. It taught programming in COBOL, of all things, on a mainframe or maybe it was a mini-computer, I'm not sure. I just know the CPU was about the size of a refrigerator. It booted up using 8 inch floppies. I wish I found out, but I'm not sure what system or OS it was. I believe it was from IBM though. There were about a dozen terminals connected; they were probably serial terminals connected to a timesharing IBM OS.
I did about two COBOL assignments on that system before I asked the teacher if I could learn on my PC at home. He gave me a copy of Microsoft COBOL that ran on DOS and I breezed through the entire year's coursework in 2 months using my PC at home. In the movies, what happened next would be dramatized and played up for its significance... my teacher started to teach me C, outside of the prescribed class curriculum. He saw in me the ability and drive to learn programming. I continued going to this class for the rest of high school on Saturdays, learning to program in C. This started me on a path that would lead to a computer science degree and subsequent software development career. Already knowing C gave me a huge leg up in college; the practicum courses were that much easier because I didn't have to learn C at the same time.
During my college breaks, I would continue to show up to class. At this point, the teacher was my mentor and good friend. We continued to stay in touch until his untimely demise from a heart attack in 2008. I still miss him. Funny story he told me... he was a software developer too, but was teaching at an adult school because he went through a nasty divorce and had to pay his ex-wife a portion of his earnings. He wanted to provide as little alimony as possible, so he stopped working as a high earning software developer to be a teacher. He did go back to software development a few years later though.
Leave a comment on Twitter or Mastodon