Not sure what my exact "start" was... My mom was a computer programmer in the 70s, and on days where my elementary school was out but she had to work, she'd bring me in to work with her, and plunk me down in front of a terminal to her work mini-computer. I remember playing the original Adventure, as well as some other simple games that kept 7 year old me busy all day.
When I was in 5th grade, my teacher was taking classes for her masters at the local university, and was given an apple II to take to her classroom. I stayed after school every day for the month she had the computer, and worked on projects in Logo.
In middle school, we had an Apple II clone (Franklin Ace 1000), and I would type in games from magazines. That's how I learned to program. I was a terrible typist, and would always have bugs that I had to figure out. I eventually started modifying the games on purpose, and doing that became more fun than actually playing the games.
When I was in college in the late 80s / early 90s, I idolized our CS department sysadmin, who sat in a dark office, listening to cool music, and porting BSD to weird computers (DG Aviion). I was hooked, and decided I wanted a job like that. I bailed out of an MS degree program to take a sysadmin job. A few years later, I moved to a job as research staff in the CS department, where I got to write device drivers for high speed network cards and eventually got paid to port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha.
When I was in 5th grade, my teacher was taking classes for her masters at the local university, and was given an apple II to take to her classroom. I stayed after school every day for the month she had the computer, and worked on projects in Logo.
In middle school, we had an Apple II clone (Franklin Ace 1000), and I would type in games from magazines. That's how I learned to program. I was a terrible typist, and would always have bugs that I had to figure out. I eventually started modifying the games on purpose, and doing that became more fun than actually playing the games.
When I was in college in the late 80s / early 90s, I idolized our CS department sysadmin, who sat in a dark office, listening to cool music, and porting BSD to weird computers (DG Aviion). I was hooked, and decided I wanted a job like that. I bailed out of an MS degree program to take a sysadmin job. A few years later, I moved to a job as research staff in the CS department, where I got to write device drivers for high speed network cards and eventually got paid to port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha.