umm gosh i’m not sure

i know i did my first programming on this bad boy:

which had this awkward form of BASIC where you could (obviously) only edit one line at a time.  it came with a manual with some demo programs you could type in, which i dutifully did.  but it had no persistent memory so it was all nuked as soon as you turned it off oops.

so from there i was pretty enthralled with qbasic when we actually got a real computer.  and then i got into this cute little shareware windows scripting language (like autohotkey, for making very simple dialogs and whatnot), and visual basic, and stupid javascript tricks, and eventually perl.

but admittedly i’m a little puzzled on the order of events here.  i don’t know why my parents would’ve bought this for me unless i’d already expressed interest in programming?  or maybe they bought it for all the little trivia games it had built in, and i just ended up drawn to the programming.

i don’t know how old i was when i had this, either.  definitely single digits.  i’ve been twiddling dials for a long ass time.

i wouldn’t say i ever “realized i wanted to be a programmer” though.  there was no single critical moment where a guidance counselor came down on angel wings.  it’s just the thing i was drawn to, so when i needed a job i looked for one where i could do a thing i’m pretty alright at.