[DanielGeisler]

In 1980 I wrote a program to take horizontal and vertical seismic waveforms and plot them in different 3-D perspectives on a Gould plotter connected to an IMB 360. But let's be honest here, like most serious programmers the nature of the first program I wrote was irrelevant. It was glorious just to write software of any type in any language running on any machine! Hooked on my first byte.

[DanielGeisler]

Dang, I answered too quick. In 1978 I bought a TI-57 and wrote software to study tetration or iterated exponentiation. This was something that necessitated a computer. Soon I began to realize that I was looking at an example of chaos. I now have a web site at http://www.tetration.org with fractals and all documenting my research on tetration.