by dshacker on 4/3/25, 4:06 AM with 70 comments
by HarHarVeryFunny on 4/6/25, 5:35 PM
In March 1978 the first issue of "Personal Computer World" magazine came out, featuring the just released NASCOM-1 kit computer on the front cover. I'd just inherited 200 UKP from my grandmother, so sent it off and got myself a kit. This was a 1 MHz Z-80 system that came with 2 KB of memory (1KB for user, 1KB for system), and a built-in monitor program that let you enter programs as hex machine code. The computer itself came as bare board, bag of components to solder, and no case. It used a TV for display and cassette recorder for program/data storage. You'd hand assemble your program on paper, then enter the codes and run it. There wasn't a whole lot you could do in 1KB, but I remember coding things like a hangman game, and memorizing the op-codes well enough to program short things directly in hex.
I then went to college, taking Math & Comp Sci, graduating in 1982, and lucking into a dream job at Acorn Computers, which started my career as developer.
by changhis on 4/6/25, 5:24 PM
by wavemode on 4/6/25, 5:22 PM
In the school computer lab I did some searching and found a programming guide for that model of calculator on some university website. While printing out my assignment I also secretly printed out the guide and hid it under the other papers (not supposed to be wasting ink on a personal print job). Took it home and was glued to it for months.
Eventually I was able to program the game Snake. It ran slow as hell, but it ran.
by rco8786 on 4/6/25, 10:22 PM
by arionhardison on 4/6/25, 5:08 PM
by mintplant on 4/6/25, 5:15 PM
I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten the early start that I did. I'd be a completely different person without that.
by corysama on 4/6/25, 6:56 PM
In high school, the IT guy got bored and started a class teaching Pascal. The whole class timeshared a Linux 386 via amber Wyse terminals. He also had a follow-on class that taught C. But, his attitude was "If you made it through the first class and came back, you're cool. Here's a book on C and a compiler. Go make up your own assignments and I'll be busy teaching Pascal to the new kids over there." I've been programming C/C++ for over 25 years now. Thanks, IT Guy!
by dcminter on 4/6/25, 4:55 PM
Thereafter it was the more conventional British route into computing via Clive Sinclair's cheap but, er, cheap, ZX81 for me... but those minis lit the fuse.
by aerhardt on 4/6/25, 4:36 PM
by jagged-chisel on 4/6/25, 7:01 PM
I took the knowledge and ran with it. Didn’t take long to want more, found a game programming book using assembly - but since I didn’t have an assembler, I entered machine code directly. That kept be engaged for years.
by bloomingeek on 4/6/25, 4:29 PM
by technothrasher on 4/7/25, 2:59 PM
(Hey, neat, here's a browser based version of the game: https://www.commodoregames.net/CommodorePET/Dungeon-86.html)
by sircastor on 4/6/25, 8:00 PM
There’s a great value to curiosity, and I think it’s incredibly important that we nurture it in our society.
by karaterobot on 4/6/25, 7:05 PM
by noufalibrahim on 4/7/25, 12:55 PM
I think it's very useful to work with barely working outdated systems early in ones education. They can teach you a lot which and the knowledge will compound very quickly.
by gavinhoward on 4/6/25, 6:01 PM
by smj-edison on 4/6/25, 7:15 PM
My mom's computer screen broke when it got dropped on the ground, but it still had a working VGA port. So, she reached out to someone in our congregation who did sysadmin work who installed Ubuntu 12.04 on it. He also helped get a LAMP stack installed locally, and set up a server that I could deploy code to. It was funny since there was little 10 year old me lugging around a chunky monitor with this laptop everywhere I went.
I was homeschooled, so I got an hour of computer time every day as long as I was doing something productive. The Khan Academy CS course had just been released, so my dad helped me get started, and I consumed those tutorials! I also got to check out other people's projects and tweak random numbers to see what happened. The KA community is incredible, since you can comment on others' programs and they're pretty responsive.
Another fun thing was doing Minecraft modding (shout out to bedrock miners' tutorials!). To this day I'm shocked that my 12 year old self was writing java code like that, but I suppose I was mainly just copying and pasting code, lol.
There's so many little projects in various languages I did (tried and failed to make an android app, tried to make a couple JS games but was bad at finishing stuff, made SVN for Khan Academy, read some random books on clojure and elixir, started but never completed an inventory management system for my aunt). But, when I think back, Khan Academy on that old laptop really kicked it off.
by piva00 on 4/6/25, 5:34 PM
When I was around 9 I discovered that the videogame my dad had, a Gradiente Expert, could boot into some kind of BASIC REPL. The machine was a clone of the MSX re-branded in the Brazilian market to be allowed within the import substitution policy.
I had barely learnt to read but I got very, very excited seeing the command line pop-up. My dad worked in the telecom industry, and I had seen him many times working on a command line. I flipped through the manual and eventually figured out how to make the computer write characters on the screen.
From then on I spent years obsessed with learning how to program on the MSX, then on the 386 running MS-DOS at home, eventually Win95 appeared, and since my dad worked in telecom we were some of the first ones I knew to get an internet connection.
On the web I learnt HTML, CGI, then ASP, and later PHP. I think I was about 12-13 when I tried to learn C/C++ for modding games, some 3D modeling, etc., eventually culminating with me getting a job as an intern/youth apprentice scheme at 15-16 to help programming a factory's intranet systems to comply with ISO9001.
My dad never really pushed me to work with computers or anything, I think I was just a very curious kid who loved science, and also tinkering and building stuff. I realised only later in my 30s how it all connected, building with coding was probably immensely satisfying for me as a kid, very fast feedback on what works or not, many puzzles to solve, and virtually free of expenses that I couldn't afford.
by WillAdams on 4/6/25, 5:43 PM
The school eventually got some TRS-80s, and I did a summer program where we passed an Apple ][ off as a robotics program, and I mowed grass summers and eventually bought a Commodore Vic-20 and later a TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1 (in retrospect, should have waited and gotten the Model 100).
Got Inman's book on Apple Machine Language, and a couple of other programming books, and lots of magazines (including one which had the ad "We See Farther" ad: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_11970... ) and typed in lots of program listings for games and so forth, and used Scripsit for my senior term paper.
Bought a 128K Mac and pretty much one of everything in the store, then switched to Windows 'cause I wanted a portable device, until the NCR-3125 and Go Corp.'s PenPoint came out --- paired that w/ a NeXT Cube which got me through college and was pretty much the high-water mark of my graphical computing experience.
by kylehotchkiss on 4/6/25, 5:04 PM
by siez18 on 4/6/25, 4:17 PM
I loved playing computer games when I was young, and in school, they were also teaching us HTML to make cool webpages. I was naturally curious so I started learning things on my own by reading computer books.
In parallel I loved gaming so much I wanted to make my own games. I started making small stuff on flash after reading online and learned a little bit of ActionScript.
That made me realize that coding is really hard to learn on my own (for my dumb brain) so I thought to check my local computer institutes for basic courses. Found a small coaching center. Instead of coding, they convinced me that I needed to learn hardware first and impressed a teenage kid by showing simple tricks like breaking windows password, upgrading hardware, etc.
So I did that course for 6 months and to my surprise I enjoyed it as well and learned a lot on my own too. Finally, I started building computers for a living and started a small home-computer repair venture with my friend (during college).
by hx8 on 4/6/25, 6:30 PM
At fourteen I became interested in "serious" programming and bought a copy of Visual Studio along with a C++ book. I was mostly interested because I read online that C++ was challenging.
At seventeen I took an interest in Linux, and started using that full time realizing I could have saved myself from spending literally all my money by using an open source C++ compiler.
At 21 I finally found myself in a Computer Science undergraduate department.
Somewhere along the way I started building PCs, but my interest was always more on the software side than the hardware side.
by AlexCoventry on 4/6/25, 5:04 PM
by neom on 4/7/25, 4:30 PM
by thirdgear209 on 4/6/25, 5:11 PM
I am a big believer that for many of us, curiosity, a desire to learn, and no fear of failure are key to learning. I happen to be work in the industry full time, however I apply the same skillset towards art, cooking, welding/fabrication. The ability to analyze and problem solve is really what it is about.
'Learn to learn' is the advice I give anyone entering the field, and oh yeah, drop the ego as that tends to hold you back from your potential; we are are continually learning...
by silversmith on 4/7/25, 8:29 AM
I was in second or third grade, I think. Highlights include figuring out that if you prevented most of the drivers from loading, it was just possible to run Doom with 4MB of RAM. And installing Windows 95 from a shopping bag full of floppy discs (literally, a bag), and deciding that while it was cool to have running, the resulting 4 or 5 MB of free disk space was not conducive to proper computing.
by ergonaught on 4/6/25, 5:02 PM
Precisely zero influences on this from family.
by stevekemp on 4/6/25, 7:31 PM
As a result of low cash for the first time ever my parents bought my sisters and I a shared present - A Sinclair ZX Spectrum, 48k.
The computer came with 10-12 casette-tapes, a tape recorder, bundle of manuals and a joystick. Unfortunately the tape-recorder didn't work so we couldn't load any of the games.
I spent Christmas reading the BASIC manual, and my sisters spent it being disappointed.
I wrote about this here, in the past in a little more detail:
by _DeadFred_ on 4/7/25, 3:27 AM
by knowaveragejoe on 4/7/25, 2:58 PM
I remember adults being very apprehensive about messing about with things. I didn't have the same(perhaps learned) aversion to playing with the settings of something. To some degree, I wonder if this was a learned behavior from an earlier era where it was _much_ harder to just reset something and try again.
by SoftTalker on 4/6/25, 5:50 PM
Later in early high school used paper route money to buy a TI-99/4a. Learned more BASIC and then assembly language on that.
by UncleSlacky on 4/6/25, 4:48 PM
by jessekv on 4/6/25, 6:21 PM
I still think these things (especially the TI-89) are really underrated. They have a battery life measured in months to years and can do calculus symbolically.
by bitwize on 4/6/25, 7:16 PM
I mean, the man is a stone-cold genius. Anything he needed to know how to do, he would bro down and learn it, often in a very short time. Even though I didn't understand half of what he was trying to do back then, it was a wonder to young me, especially since it came about by merely feeding instructions into the machine.
Eventually, for my fifth birthday, he went down to Crazy Eddie's and got me a Commodore VIC-20, so I would keep my grubby mitts off his expensive professional equipment. I then began writing my own BASIC programs, to make the PETSCII birds from the tutorial manual fly according to my own plan and so forth. The love of computing had been planted. And here I am. That five-year-old kid, awestruck by having an electronic genie I can type my wishes to and see them granted, is still in there somewhere. The grind of Scrum, meetings, deadlines, legacy code, and the looming spectre of "vibe coding" turning my work and passion into a triviality haven't snuffed the flame yet.
by ChrisMarshallNY on 4/6/25, 6:52 PM
Lots of messing around with things that go bang; Then, I attended a redneck tech school, where I learned Electronic Design, Machine Code and "microprocessors" (what they called CPUs, back then). That was around '82-'83.
All the rest has been seminars, OJT, and just plain ol' messing around at home.
by shw1n on 4/6/25, 4:21 PM
Eventually learned HTML to spruce up my profile.
Then discovered running a “mall” to earn Neopoints and so I handcrafted a banner in MS Paint and manually mapped pixels for turning it into a link map
Then had my neopoints stolen by a fake website, tried to recreate fake website for myself, leading to… CTFs, hacking & cybersecurity
by 123pie123 on 4/6/25, 4:34 PM
I'd fix PC's then play around with them - i still remember how badly incompatible conner and seagate HDDs where, that tried to share the same IDE cable
by cbm-vic-20 on 4/6/25, 7:02 PM
That book literally changed my life.
by evandena on 4/6/25, 4:10 PM
by howard941 on 4/6/25, 4:25 PM
by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK on 4/6/25, 8:06 PM
by txdv on 4/6/25, 5:14 PM
by emptybits on 4/6/25, 4:33 PM
by blovescoffee on 4/6/25, 4:32 PM
> How breaking computers taught me to build them....
but it is
> Taught me to build them...