[michuk]

One day I was playing a game on my ZX Spectrum micro-computer (I was 9 or 10 at the time) when something unexpected happened. The loader threw an exception and I was presented with a weird listing of words and numbers which turned out to be program's source code. Something told me to mess around with it, I changed a few names and numbers and somehow managed to run the program. It worked and funnily enough, the things I changed in source were reflected in new labels in the app (a football manager AFAIR).

This was early nineties and I had no books, no library, no Internet to learn from (my parents had no programming knowledge either) so I had to hack around. I learned to stop programs just before they finished loading and view the source and learn from it (good old days when no one thought of closed-source and obfuscation).

Soon I started writing my first app in Basic. It was a game where you had to get a dot around a rectangular track. Not a complex one but took me a few days to finish.

Things went fast from then. I learned Pascal and started writing more complex programs on a PC. When choosing a school I didn't even consider anything else than computer science. Got my first programming job in a Warsaw-based software house when 21, while still studying. I learned Java and Linux at that company. Then came a few others and eventually in 2010 I started my own company, a movie analyics startup Filmaster.TV which is all I'm focused on right now.

Spaghetti Monster only knows where would I be now if not for that faulty ZX Spectrum program in my childhood.

[stevekemp]

I remember Football Manager - as you say it was written in BASIC, one of the few games that I owned which was.

I started hacking on a ZX Spectrum, initially via the orange manual, later with books from the library and so on.

After BASIC I jumped to assembly, and kept up on assembly on MS-DOS 3.3, via Ralph Brown's interrupt list. I didn't try pascal, or any other real language, until many years later at university.

[kamme]

Aah, Ralph Brown's interrupt list, that takes me back a long time. I used to write assembler quite a lot when I was ~14year old. Now I'm a webdeveloper mainly doing php and some basic sysadmin stuff and it strikes me how far apart those things are. Assembler needs a different mindset and it's quite hard to get into it again.

[michuk]

Great game indeed. I remember translating it later all to Polish changing all the British premier league teams and players to local teams. My dad could not believe that was even possible :)