When we finally got there and installed it, it ran at about 2 frames per second. My friend didn't let it phase him. He played it in slow motion for weeks in my attic. Shoot. Wait. Wait. Missed. Shoot again. Wait Wait...
I couldn't take it, and eventually learned about autoexec.exe & config.sys, about the different types of memory etc. Trying to get games like this to run.
Even from the outset its been a battle of hate & love :P
After us, 3 other Hack Clubs popped up, and it's been magical to see them hosting school hackathons and summer camps. I really hope that this continues so we can show more students what pushed us into the wild coding world!
I went from playing pinball, to video games, and fell in love with it all. In about the 7th grade I started to design my own games, working out how they'd play and the layout of screens ( on graph paper...lol ) etc...
Later I earned enough cash to get an Apple II+ with all the programming manuals it came with, and spent most of my highschool nights recreating games I'd played and designing new ones in Basic and then eventually 6502 assembly.
Without money for college, I spent my 20's working odd jobs and continued to program on the side. Eventually I got my foot in the door at a national news paper's budding computer department, writing help files and documenting all the existing systems... and worked my way into web development from there.
I'm only in it for the money.
The one thing that pushed me to follow this path was a joy for pc gaming, an enthusiastic teacher and income per profession rankings showing that computer science pays quite well.
From there I used to travel into the Computing Teaching Centre in Oxford University on weekends to write BASIC on a CTL Modular One[2]. I had no idea of the significance at the time but I met Tony Hoare[3] there on numerous occasions. It was a friend who got us in, I think he just knocked on the door and said can we play with your computers and remarkably they said yes. I was 14 or 15 at the time.
The first computer I owned was an Acorn System 1[4], 1KB RAM, 512 bytes ROM and a 7 segment calculator display. I had to work through the summer holidays picking fruit to pay for it. I spent countless hours hand assembling code for it, I think the biggest project I did was a Forth like language.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-57 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Technology_Limited#Th... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_System_1
After this event, I learnt how to clean and tweak Windows. I started searching and comparing programs. I installed Firefox, adblock, an antivirus and a firewall, etc. I remember also asking my parents if I could open the computer to see how it works. It's also the period I started to spend a lot of time on forums. I discovered MMORPGs. Then I built my own gaming computer and made a basic website about the game I was playing.
However, I was terrible at my music classes because I didn't enjoy many of them. Theory, conducting, and just doing scales all day. At some point I was determined to turn things around, and I decided to build an excel spreadsheet to help figure out what I needed to make in order to bring my grades up.
This was when I discovered VBA for excel. I had never programmed before, but I thought it was such a fun challenge. So I ended up making this over-engineered gradebook for my classes... At the end of the semester my grades were awful, but I changed schools, got my GPA back up, and changed my major to CS.
My classroom was the first class in the school to get a computer. At the time, nobody knew how to work the things, so instead of rotating around all of the different classrooms each week, it was left in our room for half of the year.
During that time, I got to use it a lot and became more fluent on it than the teacher. Eventually, a local news crew came to do a story on this rollout of computers in the classroom, and I got to be on local TV showing the reporter how to do stuff on this 'new technology'.
I learned that not everyone 'got' computers like I did.
Around the time I was looking to get serious about coding, my friend mentioned he attended a sort of code club. I was immediately curious and looked it up. It turned out to be run together with Hack Club[0], an organization helping kids run computer science clubs internationally. Unfortunately, I didn't go to his high school (and there wasn't one at mine) so I was unable to attend his coding club. However, I could still join the Hack Club Slack[1] where I've been helped by many (and have begun to help others).
I'm looking forward to starting a Hack Club at my high school this upcoming school year, and hope many more can have the experience I had, sooner. I don't work for Hack Club but can personally recommend them.
[0]: https://hackclub.com
I studied computer science, but didn't really know why I did it. I learned about all this programming syntax, solving smaller problems, but it was always difficult for me grasping the bigger picture. But there was one seminar for half a year which open my eyes: Distributed Systems. Suddenly the bigger picture, having webservices, IOT or mobile devices, made so much more sense to me. Everything is connected with an API and not till then the acronym made sense for me. After the seminar I saw this huge potential in programming, because everything could be connected. That's when I started to develop serious interest in programming. If you are interested about it , you can read the whole story over [here](https://www.robinwieruch.de/what-is-an-api-javascript/).
When I was a kid, home computers were barely a thing. We had one, but I only played with it. I thought maybe I'd grow up to be an architect. I took a few programming classes in middle school (logo and basic), but I started messing around with web pages in high school in the late 90's--mostly for publishing, since I liked to write and draw. JavaScript code was relatively small and rarely obfuscated then, so I learned a lot by reading the source of pages with cool layouts or effects. Haven't stopped since then.
Turns out there's a whole field where you can design things to solve problems or create experiences and make them come into being just by thinking about them carefully (and writing down your thoughts). The feedback loop for satisfaction and learning is very tight compared to architecture.
My dad was really into electronics and got a Windows 95 for home use. He insisted that my sister and I learn how to type.
He also made the fatal mistake of sharing the MechWarrior 2 and MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries CDs that came with our computer with me. I popped them in and got hooked. So I learned how to type, but I also developed a huge love for video games.
Basically, the rest of my childhood was spent thwarting the various ways my parents devised to try and lock me out of using the Internet/playing games. The more my parents tried to keep me off the computer, the more I wanted to be on.
My fascination with video games also made it so I wanted to learn to program. I learned some basic control flows in C++ at 13. Never really went much past that, because I started working in technical theatre and lighting, and spent more of my time programming lights and setting up lighting networks.
Picked it back up again in college, when I started taking game development classes and having to build stuff in Unity and GameMaker.
Interestingly, with the web it was quite similar: "View > Page Source" and the ability to quickly learn and create something yourself really fascinated me about the web. Accessibility in my opinion was one of the key aspects that really made the web take off.
The computer came with ~10 casette-tapes, a casette-player for loading them, and the computer itself. Unfortunately the casette-player we received in our bundle was broken. Which meant that we couldn't load any games.
So I read the manual instead, and experimented with programming in BASIC. A week later, or so, (all the shops being closed around Christmas time in the UK back then), we had a working system. My sisters played games, and while I did too I was hooked on programming.
A few more details here:
That was my first taste of a computer, and of programming. And I've loved both ever since.
https://esheavyindustries.com/2017/01/i-owe-my-career-to-bei...
I'm really glad it worked out the way it did. I enjoy this a lot more than I ever could have thought.
Then taking apart my parent's IBM work computer to see how it worked, mostly got it back together..
Found a book on basic in the library around age 8 and was hooked.
I didn't really care that much about computers at the time, though. Over the years, I became a power user of Windows, iOS, and macOS, but I was way more into sports, particularly baseball. After a while, though, I became the fat kid that all the pitchers liked to hit, and when the pitchers started learning to throw 80 MPH fastballs in early high school, I decided I needed a new hobby. That's when I started getting serious about understanding code and becoming a developer.
I bounced around free tutorial after tutorial online, and I ended up with a solid understanding of how to make a static website. I saw a few ads between YouTube videos for a more cohesive online coding school called Treehouse, and they were running a promotion at the time where if you bought one of their pro subscriptions, they'd give one for a year for free to a public high school student. I thought to myself, "Hey, I'm a public high school student. I wonder how I can get on the receiving end of that?", and so after some googling, I found their CEO's email address, and asked him. He got me set up with that, and I've been hooked ever since. I taught myself everything from the web front-end to scripting languages like Python to mobile development. Nowadays I'm a moderator on their community forums, supporting myself as a freelance iOS/web developer.
In high school, I was also really into the technical clubs I had available to me. I went for the majority of my Junior year to a high school in suburban Philadelphia, where I joined the robotics club, which got pretty much all my attention and passion while I was there. There was also a computer science club there, too, which was part of the Hack Club family of high school coding clubs. I loved that club, too. It was a great time to stop worrying about the stresses of they day/week before, and just sit back and work and learn about code with other people who're into it. I enjoyed it so much that when I went back to my former high school in suburban Nashville for my Senior year, I started another Hack Club there, too. Since then, I've pretty well known what my life's passion is, and now I'm trying to use it to start a career.
Treehouse: https://teamtreehouse.com Hack Club: https://hackclub.com My website: https://hulet.tech
Not to mention all the general IT fiddle-frigging that was involved in making games run, or fixing your PC after something went disastrously wrong with that, and you needed to get it back in a working state before the parents noticed that you'd broken the computer...