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My dad had purchased a Commodore 64 back in 1984 (I was 6). He bought it so he could create spreadsheets, etc. to track his budget or other household things. It came with a book on BASIC, which was built into the computer (in lieu of an 'operating system'). I began reading and copying the sample programs in the book, and slowly taught myself how to program. One day, I was being punished for something, so my dad took away the external floppy drive for a week so I wouldn't be able to play any of my games. I remembered that I could just write my own, so I wrote a simple Hangman game. It took me 2 days, but I still did it. (Again, I was 6) Although, Hangman is not much fun when you're the one who wrote it an you know what the words could possibly be. But, I digress... Anyway, my parents were very impressed that I had taught myself how to do this all on my own. Years later, in high school, they bought me my own PC (an IBM clone with a 386DX-40 processor, 4MB RAM, etc.) that I used to learn Microsoft QuickBASIC (a more advanced version of BASIC than came with the Commodore), C, and eventually C++. From there, I studied Computer Science in college, and the rest is history. |
Priceless. As someone whose first program calculated the value of a pair of resistors I can only conclude you were way ahead of me at 6 when I was 12...