[sokoloff]

I self-taught at 7 on a TRS-80 that I could use in the summertime, typing in the examples and then modifying them to make (pretty terrible) variants or games.

Got my first computer (Atari 1200XL) a little after a friend got an Apple ][. We learned by typing in games from books and magazines and modifying them.

I sold my first program around age 11 for $20. It was 6502 assembly subroutine to calculate an XMODEM checksum for a BBS. They had BASIC code that worked okay for a 300 baud modem, but took too long to calculate the checksum for 1200 baud modems. That was hand assembled from op codes in a book and represented almost $1/byte of object code. (Imagine if we got paid that much now. :) )

I (mistakenly) thought I was pretty good until I showed up at college and couldn’t breeze through an intro level actual programming class, so “starting at 7” didn’t really mean that much in terms of my professional career.