[northwest66]

I've never met a good programmer that wasn't (at least initially) self taught. Presumably they exist, but I've never met one.

I do agree though, I find when I'm teaching my juniors I sometimes have to give a little history lesson as part of it (things like why 8.3 filenames).

[sevensor]

> why 8.3 filenames

Why is that, exactly? I grew up in that era, I remember when floppies were actually floppy, and I've been well into computers ever since, but I don't believe I could tell you why. If I had to guess, I'd guess that FAT used a fixed number of bytes for each filename.

[northwest66]

Yep you got it. My first actual PCs (I don't count the Apricot PCs haha) were DOS 3.3, and I still remember the transition away from 33MB partitions although it's so long ago I can't remember if that came in with DOS 4.0 (abort abort!) or 5. I thought I was so cool having a PC with drives A B C D E F G H I.

[u801e]

I had a 486 PC with a 100 MB hard drive running Dos 5.x (can't recall the minor version). The hard drive was definitely a single partition.

[FranOntanaya]

Oh man, rich kids had a D: drive. The rest of us had to make do with A: and C:

[skookumchuck]

It was 6.3 before that. The PDP-10 system :-)

[kbob]

I don't know about PDP-10s. DEC's PDP-11 operating systems used a character set called RAD-50, short for radix (octal) 50, for filenames and various other purposes.

The (decimal) 40 characters were A-Z, 0-9, and four punctuation characters -- I don't remember which. Three characters could be stored in a 16 bit word, so a 6.3 filename required 3 words or 6 bytes. The '.' separator was not stored, of course.

The implementers of CP/M or one of those early PC OSes copied the idea but not the encoding and picked 8.3 as a slightly more usable size. Floppy drives were relatively capacious (!) so bigger filenames were reasonable.

The only reason I know this PDP-11 trivia is that end users could recompile the RT-11 kernel to save space, and DEC distributed the OS sources to enable that. The distributed version was written in assembler and had had comments stripped, so it wasn't quite like reading the Lions book, but you could read it if you really wanted to.

[HankB99]

Didn't that include a ';' and version number too? (Or was that later - RSX-11M on a PDP 11/23)

[skookumchuck]

I think that was later.

[jclulow]

It did.

[fsloth]

I think I'm one.

I don't think starting early or on your own is a requirement. Like in any field, intrinsic motivation is what counts (IMO).

I started programming in university at... um... 19? As a part of a physics degree. And fell totally in love with it. 20 years later I'm doing it for living and the love really hasn't faded.

Computer graphics is a demanding mistress, you really need to understand why programs and computers work.

Based on my experiences I would consider myself a pretty OK programmer.

[astura]

Hi, I'm a good programmer (according to my bosses and peers) and I wasn't initially self taught, CS 101 was the first time I programmed ever. Nice to meet you.

[incompatible]

I thought 8.3 filenames were obsolete, even on Windows? Do your juniors even have any idea what you are talking about?

[Arkight]

It is quite obsolete, but we can still use them in modern windows for legacy program support.

As for whether such legacy program exist anymore it is a mystery.

[ZenoArrow]

I still use .htm as an extension name for HTML files, even though all modern OS' can support .html. I wonder how common that is.