Conan the Barbarian and Below the Root on our Apple IIe. Tiny worlds behind the glowing Orange CRT. How do I make something like this? My mum (lol) helped me figure out how to get keyboard input in BASIC. I made a little game where an O character chases your X character around the screen. Core game loop. Browsing pirate CGA games at the warung in Pondok Indah, well outside the jurisdiction of US law. Glorious rack upon rack of tiny worlds to explore. Death Track and Prince of Persia. More BASIC and that gorilla throwing bananas. Later on the Multiline BBS. Talking late into the night with tech weirdos twice my age. All manner of mind bending ideas. Newsgroups. Punks and skaters and cypherpunks. Predicting what was coming, seeing the future we expected unfolding. Downloading Commander Keen over FTP. WinSock and Netscape. My first homepage. Downloading Linux and getting it running. Configuring XFree86 modelines all night lol. Turbo Pascal and VAX VMS at uni. My first job coding. Hacking out web backends in gnarly ass Perl. No databases just blatting and slurping comma delimited text files lol. Getting paid to do the most exciting thing there was to do, all day. Magic.

For me, it was the creative, puzzle-solving, game-like nature of it. Then I got my first job, and I had 100% autonomy, so a friend of mine and I got to solve real problems for real people in the real world. It was a rush. Making people’s lives better through software is still the biggest motivation for me.

Getting to build things without skinned knuckles or solder smoke in your face... now that is a rush! And if you are not happy with it, you get to tear it down and build it back up better. It costs nothing but your time and imagination. Importantly, you get to build, to solve problems, to engineer, to visualize, to create and be creative. (Ok, maybe musicians have even more fun, but alas I wasn't wired for music. :-)

(2015) Even links to the HN discussion at the time (89 points, 59 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8837545

I started programming on my schools CASIO Graphics Calculator.

It was slow but allowed some text based games we then shared. No internet so did it all from trial and error.

Then ... i wanted a 3D Cube rotating. At 15/16 this was a bit too much i guess i had no idea about rotation matrices back then and deemed myself a bit dense.

Never got around doing 3D stuff at work, only databases all the time. I dabbled some with ThreeJS but i guess i was still haunted.

BUT THEN. Geometric algebra! So smooth. If you like tables and had problems with stuff like cross products or quaternions, didnt like copy pasting rotation matrices, etc. YOU WILL LOVE geometric algebra! It's like you meet 2 tables on a FK and bam its a volume (highly simplified!!)

Just my 2 cents. Don't write yourself off if you did not do 1337 demos in primary school on a tamagotchi.

I took a course at a college in '79 using fortran on a mainframe (though I was just in middle school at the time). I can't say I understood all of the incantations required (IBM had JCL), but realized it was "magical" and wanted to be part of this tribe.

I saved up to buy a VIC-20 (a 4K computer) and later a C64, writing games for both. Those were magical days I will look back to fondly. That sparkle has not left, though I sometimes miss the purity of near-bare-metal systems of yesteryear.

Like some in my generation, I lived through and contributed to some of the early phases of computing, pre-internet, and am altogether grateful for it.

I started on a Ti-83 and better yet could take other programs online and load them and then modify to my desire.

When the teacher said show your work I wrote out the program I made to calculate the equation. They banned calculators altogether.

Once there was a computer I traded sleep to stay on it. I worked professionally for almost 3 decades and it ultimately cost me my health and mental health. It was often my own insecurities and anxiety that led me up the ladder.

I left the field and went to work for something I believe in and my tech skills are like wizardry to these folks.

There is a lot of blue sky to explore for people in tech.

I don't consider myself a programmer, I started programming in my late 30s after I got my first office job. I learned it to automate all the bullshit I needed to do.

Wish now I'd started earlier. It's like having a special power if your actual job isn't programming. I like getting the computer to do my job for me.

i like u somehow found some digital friends back then, carefully not to spill the beans to the wrong people. I never did until later computer shop opened and i bumped there into familiar face. together we put pocket money to little book about basic with floppy that included tools.

nice blog :) cracked loose some fond memories.

I didn't really get into coding before HS. By chance we had this elective class called "Java Programming", where the teacher showed us a bunch of applets which piqued my interest.

Our very first "real" program was some local network chat system, which I found extremely fascinating - because I had suddenly gone from writing a bunch of terminal/CLI programs which felt a bit...boring, to writing something which felt like "proper" software.