[Tell It Right]

I owe my career to being able to casually write code at home in BASIC on a cheap computer (C64) before I was old enough to drive.

[11th_VA]

I owe my career to being able to casually write code

Ditto - I probably could have gotten by with just 3 college courses

[DeplorablePaul]

Me too. I learned to program Basic by typing in the long programs from pc magazine. One time I wrote a program to see which numbers of a lotto drawing come up the most frequently and let it run for a month. It proved nothing but it was fun to write. During my 30 career as a Unix Admin I was particularly good at writing shell scripts to automate procedures - I hardly ever had to do the same thing twice - and monitoring functions. It was because of the hours I spent at my TRS 80 Basic programming.

[Myrddin]

My first useful code was on an HP25 calculator. June 1976. The program replaced a fairly coarse table of genetic probabilities with a fine grained calculation. The following year I sold the first 5 TRS80 computers in San Diego county. At $599 it was too expensive for my minimum wage job at Radio Shack. Another year later, I sold my ASR15 teletype machine and put the money into a Heathkit H-8. That machine opened doors to BASIC, C and Pascal. I built code in all 3 languages in 1979. The C compiler destroyed my 8 inch floppy drive with a 20 minute compile of the word count (wc.c) source. Hard disks on the SASI interface were too expensive.

I'm spoiled today with a laptop running a quad core i7, 64 GB RAM, 2 TB NVme disk and 34 inch display. Languages and tools are very good today. A gigabit fiber network completes the setup. That said, we owe thanks to Kurtz and Kemeny for enabling the discipline of software engineering to get underway.