My mom never touched a PC or smartphone. Well, most people didn't back then, because it was the early 90s.

But I brought a borrowed SNES to the hospital and taught her to blow on the Zelda cartridge if it didn't work. She died after we finished the game.

After that my dad bought me a commodore 64, the machine that taught me about electronics and programming, and molded me into who I am today.

On the first date with my girlfriend (now 12y together) we just sat talking for hours in her room, playing Zelda on her SNES taking turns, and I told her my mom would have liked her.

My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.

I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.

I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.

So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.

I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.

That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.

After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.

In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.

A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.

But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.

Rantish story time!

Today I impressed myself. I was told in all seriousness by a PM "couldn't we do this API in HTML?" and kept a straight face. Even though he doubled down, following with "oh, do you think the language isn't powerful enough?".

Good times!

Found a Commodore 64C in the trash today.

My first personal computer in 1988: the ZX Spectrum +.

48 KBytes of memory.

The European opponent of Commodore 64. Sic!

@dfox man, do you realize the amount of desks that have cleaned *for the first time* because of this week topic? 😅

I'm puzzled, what kind of lobby put you up to this?

I wanted a computer for my Christmas. Must have been 1987 and I just have been about 8.

A few days before Xmas my aunt gave me a card with £5 in it. I asked my dad “dad, if I was getting a computer I could use the £5 to buy a game”

My dad explained to me that we couldn’t afford it and maybe next year.

Woke up the next morning to a shiny new Commodore 64 AND my own little tv.

Never been happier.

Chuck Peddle Dies at 82 (December 15, 2019); His $25 Chip Helped Start the PC Age.
His Chip brought digital technology to a new breed of consumer devices and powered early Apple and Commodore computers. 6502 microprocessor; KIM-1 SBC; Commodore PET PC are the notable works.

1984
Age 9
Commodore 64
Taught myself BASIC

You're so inconsistent you could work in the php core team.

I was 8 years old the boy in the block invited me said I have something to show you. His parents bought him a Macintosh. He typed my name on the black screen and there was a response.
He said look it says “How are you?” And I was mesmerised got so excited I was like wow 😲
Guess what the text was actually saying? syntax error 😂 Little did I know at that time!!
I went home and told my parents, can you believe what I’ve seen today?? Computer responded me talked to me!!
On my birthday I got a Commodore 64 that year and the story begun.

I love mornings ; the dimmed light of the sun slowly rising, the stillness in the office, the smell of the freshly poured coffee and most of all, the excruciatingly loud motherfucker and his power drill.

Aaaaaah 😖

When I was a little boy my father who was an entrepreneur back then hired a computer programmer to develop some kind of administrative software for him. He was programming on the Commodore VIC20. I was very interested in what he was doing and he gave me some books about programming basic on the VIC20. I read them, started programming and I've been hooked ever since!

As I do still remember this man's name I searched on the internet now and then to see if I could find him. End of last year I found him on FB and wrote him a message to thank him for what he did back then. It's because of him that I found out what I love doing most and have a great working career and life because I do what I love to do and get paid very well for it.

Thanks, mr. Stomp!

At the age of 9, I was getting frustrated that my Commodore 64 didn't always respond the way I wanted. So I had to teach it to do better. BASIC was the language. Plenty of GOTOs. In the end I got so much connected to GOTO idiom that I used it extensively in my C++ OO exam in college. Needless to say, the professors were stunned and blatantly disgusted with my code.

Why don't they build all-in-one keyboard & computers anymore? 😃

Why does every kid developer have a dark theme fetish? I started programming on a Commodore 64. It was dark. It's the quality of the shit you write that defines you assholes, not the color theme of your editor.

Now that that's off my chest, some poos soul has dared to send his resume to me. One of his projects is a website that is being marked by my ENS as a phishing website. I am about to invite him for an interview, and am willing to bet his everything will be dark because he wants to impress me.

Had to be done...
This way i'm not pissed at myself half the time.

1986. Commodore 64 computer. First program in assembler to move cursor on screen. I will never forget that day.

Back then it was for kids. Today i think it wil be torture for them.

Ps my first language was assembly (not judging)

Damn, GitHub is on rampage lately. After dropping tls < 1.3 support, they are expected to drop IE support by July.

Praise GitHub 😍

Alright. Two dead Commodores.

Over 15 years before I was born? ✅
No idea how BASIC works? ✅
Internet at the ready? ✅

So far I've checked various chips for visible damage, and nothing except a blown fuse on both machines. Apparently it takes dual 9vAC and single 5vDC. The 9 powers the SID and the video output, the VIC-II heatsink is off, and I've tested the PSU voltages and one of the 9v's is dead. I'll be getting new fuses and a new PSU soon. Any recommendations on other things to check or things to do when they're done? Pic included because why not.

"Here's an example code for Commodore 64. It should work on your Commodore 16 if you just leave out the POKEs and PEEKs."

Said by my sister somewhere in the mid 80s. This particular advice was silly, but I owe her for my interest in coding. It was actually her who begged our parents to get us a home computer, and took programming courses. She got bored with it though, and I got hooked up for life. Thanks sis!

10 PRINT “Hallo”
20 GOTO 10

1983 : my very first program and also very first contact with a computer - a VC64

a message to code.org

- the fact that you have celebrities back your organization does not mean your content is good

- making highschoolers (>14 years old) ask yes or no questions for a week is NOT helping them 'understand' binary, ITS JUST FUCKING DEGRADING

- all of your curriculum is useless. fucking useless. you're and 'organization' dedicated to getting children into programming. SO WHY THE FUCK DO YOU GO OUT OF YOUR WAY TO MAKE EVERYTHING WE'RE TAUGHT USELESS. the app lab is js but NOT ON A WEBPAGE, it just instructions for a fucking character that you paid shit loads of money to, and not to mention slower than my commodore 64 mining a bitcoin. if I'm going to learn js, I want to make a webpage. how many fucking js recruiters are going to ask if you can make an app code.org's app lab??? fucking none. if we're going to learn how pictures are encoded, CAN WE ENCODE A FUCKING PICTURE? jpg, png, bmp, I DON'T CARE. but the fact that we have to set a delimeter and then type a 64x64 image in binary makes me want to die, but it's also USELESS.

- in the entire networking unit, they focused more on their goddamn animations over their actual EXPLANATIONS

The year was 1983. My best friend and neighbour at the time invited me over to see an amazing device that his father had brought home from work, an IBM PC. We played a game called Track & Field, and I was amazed that the machine remembered my name once I've entered it. (Uptil then the only machines with any kind of memory that I've come in touch with, were arcade games and my cousin's video game console, which was also the first electronic gaming device I've ever played, back in 1978). In the early 1980s, computers were anything but commonplace in Åland Islands, but I think that it was in 1983 that people became aware of them, and there was a budding interest to buy one, at least among us kids. It was my sister who wished for a home computer for Christmas, so the same year Santa gave us a ZX Spectrum. It came with a game called Thro' the Wall, an Arcanoid clone(, that has inspired me to make my own clone "Wall" for all the different home computers I've had, ranging from Commodore 16 and Canon V-20 to Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200). Unfortunately, we only managed to load the game (delivered on a C cassette) like once or twice after several attempts. It turned out that the hardware was faulty and dad got a refund after first having had to complain a lot at the dealer (which went out of business some ten years ago), and then bought the Commodore the next Christmas. Anyway, I wrote my first code on the ZX Spectrum. It doesn't really count for programming as all I did was typing examples and running them. I do recall altering one example though, a program drawing the Swedish flag on the screen, by adding an inner red cross thus turning it in the Åland flag. But, with the Commodore 16 (which had an excellent Basic interpreter) I got started with programming almost immediately and by the end of 1984 I had written my fist very own Basic programs. In 1996 I got my first IT job, and am still a dev. So, what became of my childhood friend and neighbour? He runs a successful computer dealership :)

Why am I such an average ?

It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..

I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.

I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..

Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..

Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..

I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.

But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.

I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.

And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.

Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit

Javascript is better at maths than you

Please, oh please, tell me there's an exception for murdering people using their phone in speaker mode right in the middle of an open space.

Please ... I feel like it should count as public service and be rewarded ..

I'm trying to work here, it don't give the slightest flying fuck about the latest crap you dare to call code and how it fucked up your whole application.

Wrote my first code on a commodore vic 20. I was 7 years old

Who typed his/her first program with one of these?

Now this looks stupid already, but here is the kicker: by "partially hydrated cursor" i mean that once every page size an sql query is ran to get the next page content. This code is put in an event handler, executed once every time a file is uploaded in a dms where files get uploaded by the thousand.

To sum things up, this simple snippet achieves triple dipping:
* waste time on useless sql queries
* waste cpu on useless iterations
* waste disk space on useless logs

Icing on the cake, the author of this piece of shit was complaining about the overall slowness of the process.
Needless to say that when I stumbled on this, both internal *and* external screaming ensued...

Just remembered an old dad story:

Around 30 years ago I started a game on my Commodore 64, I was about 15 at the time, and back then you had to load the games from cassette tapes.

So I started the cassette player and waited for the game to load, and when it was done I stopped the tape. My dad saw this and he asked :

- "Why did you stop the tape if you want to play the game?"

And I guess it is kind of natural for someone who used cassette tapes for listening to music, to say that :-) Still I laughed at my dad...

Grandad showing me a commodore 64 that he had gotten for my uncles. shit was legit, had a bunch of games and cool shit in it. He also showed me BASIC (not programming or anything, but that it was a thing in it and the booklet explaining how to do games and stuff)

Mind you, the commodore was way beyond my years, I am a 91 baby, but he had it and kept it working and in good shape, the booklet was pristine (none of my uncles wanted to fk with that, neither did my dad).

He only showed me the machine because my mother had more vision that a lot of my family members at the time, asking him to let me use the computers that he had because she was sure (just as he) that computers were the future and a good educational tool for me.

Mom played a big ass role in me getting my comp sci degree, she was the one that celebrated it the most with my wife (wife pushed me through that degree to be honest) and my gdad is dead now, but he would have thought it would be cool to have another engineer in the family (he was an industrial engineer)

I received this fantastic t-shirt 😌

I began exploring code and graphic design early on at about 6-7 years old. My Dad had a commodore 64 with a few games and a little handbook that had some awesome examples to go by. My Dad had at one time been a subscriber to a serial magazine for Commodore enthusiasts that featured a snippet of code in each issue. After getting into my Dad's old stash of magazines I was able to combine all the magazines and write the code from each issue to create a hangman game. This got me into computers and programming. Then we did some Logo/Turtle work as got into qbasic on our IBM machine.

Year 7 maths in 1984 - the teacher had a computer and showed us some BASIC commands to do mathematics.

I was spellbound. That year my father also bought a Commodore 64 for the family and I gravitated towards it. I typed program listings out of magazines and learnt programming almost by osmosis.

A taste in college with punchcards but mostly on Commodore 64 and IBM 5050 using BASIC and dBASE II. Automated my company from paper to systems and developed many side projects. Still creating 😀

old commodore 64 basic:
10 print fuck
20 goto 10

@linuxFanboys
I'm getting a Chromebook, and, obviously, I'd rather wget all my webpages before I use chrome as my main os. so any recommendations for distros? I want a good, smooth ui, kinda like what windows was aiming for but so terribly messed up. I want apt package manager, and I wouldn't mind pentesting tools, and it has to be light enough to use on a computer with 4gb ram and 16gb ssd. I assume it's implied with linux, but I want one that's generally consider to be secure. I plan to run android studio (I expect it to be slower than a commodore 64 running windows 10), eclipse, gcc, if that helps. any suggestions? thanks!

Wrote my first programs on my Commodore C64.
First program was a number guessing game where you needed to guess a number between 1 and 100. Shit had 300+ lines because I only new the if clause and the equals comparison.
I was 9.

Later a friend showed me Modula 2 and I was instantly in love with that language.

Real programming then in school (C, C++, µC assembler).

I got a Commodore 64 as a Christmas gift at an age where I was far too young to fully appreciate it. I'd spend hours typing in code from printed magazines. Fell in love with it instantly. Nothing ever worked first time. Loading a game was a chore. It blew my mind. Little tear in my eye now thinking of how my late father and I would spend hours trying to get the beige-bastard to "play ball".

My dad bought the insanely freaky Commodore Plus/4 which should be a more "business"-oriented version of the 64. Of course the two machines were incomatible so none of the 64 games worked on the Plus/4, so there were not much options left but to start hacking into it, first in Basic and then machinecode.

All the cool kids in the neighborhood owning a Commodore 64. I was about 7-8 I think. Piracy was big back then, the kids swapped those large floppies and tapes containing hundreds of games through the mail. And all those cool hacktros, trainers, intros and whatnot got me interested in computer graphics and programming.

Another story just brought back a flood of memories of dialing into a BBS over a 9600 baud modem, and using Blue Wave to post messages on Fidonet. Back in the day when NCSA Mosaic was the standard for browsers, the 40MB HDD was king, and 1MB was a lot of memory. Wow. OMG, and before that, I had a Commodore 64 running GEOS. I'm really feeling old now.

Halt and Catch Fire is having another great season. Lived those days and it is so true. CompuServe, Compaq, Commodore, 5 1/4", Tandy 1000, Byte Mag, Atari, The Well... The tech you see is really 1985ish. Attention to detail is appreciated by long time technologists.

H&CF is about building a tech business and much applies to today's startups. That two brilliant tech women are leading the charge adds to it. All the characters are great Cameron, Gordon, Donna, the devs at Mutiny and Joe channeling Jobs (in my opinion) is spot on.

Any H&CF fans have an opinion?

My first experience with a computer was in the eighties, with a commodore 64. I was more or less 8. I remember nothing about the basic language 😑 remember only peek and poke (?)

My first exposure to computers was the TRS-80 (a.k.a. TRASH-80) my mom (the city Library Director) bought for library patrons to use. It’s data store was on a cassette tape and programs came on cartridges, IIRC.

Around the same time I was learning to do Logo and BASIC on an Apple IIe in 5th grade.

My cousin’s Commodore 64 came next and my grandma saw how my interest in computers was blooming, so she suggested I use the savings I had built up from birthday money and mowing lawns to buy an IBM PC/AT 8088 clone. $1,300 later and lots of time in my basement figuring out how to build it all from separately-shipped components, I was on my way to learning Assembler, BASIC, and DOS.

Not exactly a story since I was too young to remember, but my parents told me that I was really enjoyed playing with the games my father made for the good old commodore 64 we had.

He basically had two 5" floppy holders full of his own games and programs he used to make. Unfortunately we only have the disks now. :(

The first memory of me using the computer though, is when my father bought a computer for his office (was win 95 with the "you are now safe to switch off your computer" message) and I was sneaking in to play with paint because it was so cool back then.

Does anyone remember BASIC?

10 PRINT "Hello World!"
20 GOTO 10

I learned it when I had my Commodore 64. Recently I've gotten the itch to dive back in the development world. So I'm refreshing my memory on HTML and CSS (yes I know they're not programming languages) then move on to JavaScript and either React or Angular. Hopefully I will be able to contribute more to discussion on here than just lurk.

Thinking really hard about starting my own retro pc collection starting with the NEC pc-98 ......hmmmmmm wondee how my wife would feel about me spending money in this shit

Recently I have taken to all things retro tech, always liked it really, specially since my mom showed me pics of me playing with an old commodore 64 when i was younger as well as another of a family friend showing me the sharp 68k this shit fuels my appetite for knowing more about the programming ways of the old school coders. Some pretty interesting stuff, I feel that the newer generations would benefit greatly by knowing the things we had to do in order to build efficient programs back in the day. Not to say that I was part of that at all. I was born in 1991, how I came to see these systems is unknown and forgotten by me, but something that none the less os part of my story in computing.

Because of the industry that surrounds me I have been dealing with working with web development, but shit is really not that much of a passion of mine, had I the skills more than the academic knowledge I would love to work with low level C code all day, I just feel that the things that developers do there are so much more interesting than handilg web development, web development is tedious and a current shitstorm, not to say that shit was not like that for the programmers that i am referencing, but i just want more.

Web development has made me a successful man, at 28 i am the head of my department, I might sound like a Disney princess but I want more, I want more knowledge and more experience in different areas of Computer Science. I want to know it all and it seems like time continuously goes against me.

Oh well, here is to a new year lads, see what i can do.

Was digging through an old HDD's OEM Windows recovery partitions and found FON-format fonts that are accurate to several old systems. Several Commodore and Amiga ones (some for 80-char mode too!) and lots of DOS ones. They have names and everything, but I can't use them after installing them... (there were a few blank ones in there too, which is odd...)

Learn on a Commodore Amiga 500. All from books and shareware discs - no Interweb back then.

Commodore 64 and manuals when I was 5. Then qbasic on a 286 my dad got from work when I was 6. Been programming since, to Borland c/c++, php, html etc. Worked with most languages since.

It’s all a blur but in 5th grade I was using a TRS-80 with a cassette player for storage at the library where my mom worked. Also an Apple IIe at school in the computer lab. My first personal computer was an IBM XT clone with an 8086 processor and dot matrix printer. I bought it after having fun with my cousin’s Commodore 64 and wanting one, but his uncle sold me on the IBM platform as something that I could upgrade over time. I was 13 when I first learned Assembler and BASIC. Big Blue Disk was my favorite subscription software with all the games and other shareware stuff that came every month in the mail.

At least commodore BASIC programmers learnt about PEEK/POKE, unlike BBC BASIC programmers!

Hobby coders, what’s your favourite vintage platform to develop on? I recently started dipping my toes into vic20 and Commodore 64.

Feelin like a time traveller 🛸

My dad's commodore 64 was my first exposure to computers and I have loved them since.

To the person in charge of managing my lovely corporate computer, next time you deem timely to install god knows what software in the middle of the afternoon, discreetly burning 50% of my cpu, preventing me from working, don't.

Instead I would cordially encourage you to go fuck yourself with a cactus and ponder on your abyssal incompetence.

With restrained love,

I'm into Commodores lately. Don't judge, grandmas deserve love too!

ps I'm making my friend join devrant

I started when I was about 7 years old. My dad was an entrepreneur and had a programmer working for him who was coding in the Commodore VIC20. That man gave me some books and since then I was hooked. Started my professional career when I was 16 (now 37), all self taught and got a very solid education as well throughout the years after 16 untill now. I just can't stop loving it.

My first exposure to computers was my mom’s Commodore 64 when I was a kid. I used to love playing “Impossible Mission” and “Way Out” on there. Eventually I started programming in Basic on it.

That moment I saw a yeti factories intro with rasterbars on the commodore 64 at my cousins house, I knew I need to know how the f**k this was done! I was 10y old 😁

Qbasic and commodore 64. :) little did i knew that would lead me to the world of c and c++ lol.

Got my first computer, Commodore 64, when I was 9. My first thought and only agenda, how can I make this thing do what I want it to do. I believe there was a book that came with it that had programs in BASIC. I copied some and then began to fiddle around on my own. I fell in love and 32 years later, the saga continues.

So I wanted to make a Commodore 64 game, and I decided to use cc65, since I don’t want to use assembly.

First, I tried to position text, and I tried to use CSI escape codes, but that didn’t work.

I forgot to look at the examples, and then saw a lot of helper functions, which were nice.

Next, I tried to do some timing. sleep can only do seconds, so I wanted to use usleep, but they didn’t port it...

Moral of the story: ~~look at the docs~~ don’t make C64 games

commodore amiga 500, when I was 5 or 6.
what was the very first thing on it that i experienced, i don't know, but some things i remember:

Cannon Fodder 2
A-Train, a game that i played for months, it utterly fascinated me and i was utterly unable to keep my company afloat, because i was utterly unable to understand how the mechanics of the materials moving around worked (i still don't, actually, but in a different way)

some Apache simulator, which took us (me and father) literally a week to figure out how to get into the actual game from the main menu stylised as a military office. it took us several days to even realize it's the menu.

the Lotus Esprit 2 game, which we played regularly.

some Airbus simulator where i took two weeks of trial and error to figure out how to take off, without manual.

some experiments with midi sequencing and notation music programs.

how every two months, dad came with a 20page long list of programs and games from some pirate seller, which we would go through, mark stuff that sounded interesting (going by name only), then he would send it by post to him, and after a week, we would go take a package from post office full of floppies, literally like 200, and the next two or three weeks, we would be trying all of it out, seeing what the things we got were about, putting the good ones on one pile, the boring ones on another (cheap floppies for use)...

ah the magical times of wonder and exploration...

I love this weekly group rant, it made me think back when my mom started to work in a kindergarten and she used to take me to work when i was 4-7 years old ('94 - '97).

There was this "TV" and all the kids used to smash the buttons on it. It also played sound, but there was always a lot of kids there so I was shy to ask them if I push the buttons too. But I was the teachers son, so I didn't had to sleep in the afternoon, and then I discovered this computer thing I was amazed, it was like nothing I saw before, you push it and it does what you pushed and, *_* this smiley is exactly me back then. It was probably an old commodore with green text on the black screen. It was the moment when I decided to get more information about this wonder.

In elementary school (around '98) we had this computer room and as I was one of the best students back then I was granted access to it. It was a huge success in a post communist country to get money for new computers to teach us kids to use them back then, so only the chosen ones could use them, and I was one of them, one of the best time time of my life, honestly. At this moment I knew for sure, I want one and when I grow up I gonna work with them. I had no idea what you can do with it but every adult is talking about how well paid are the people who use them at work. :D it sounds funny now

In '89 or '99 we visited our family in a town far away. My grandfathers sisters boyfriend had a computer and he said, look I also have internet. This face again *_* what the hell is internet. So he explained me this internet thing which "makes all computers connected, but you have to pay for it and it kinda works like wired phones you know. Here you put the address and you can open the website"
me: website, whoooa *_*
8-9 year old clever me: "but how do you know what are the addresses, do you have a phonebook for these addresses?"
he showed me google, and a slovak and czech search engine, I remember searching for "funny pictures" on the slovak search engine, because I was thinking If I search google, its english so he would pay too much :D

I didn't had a computer until I was 13 years old, but then I started to messing with Microsoft Front Page 2003, was amazed with the html and css generated by it and started to editing it.

Now Im a front end web dev

Rien ne va plus, les jeux sont faits.

SYS49152

Started programming in BASIC when I was 11 (back in 1979) on a Tandy TRS-80, then onto Sinclair's machines (ZX81, Spectrum), then BBC Micro, Commodore Amiga, PCs, onto Macs and here we are! 😂

I started writing basic in 1980 on my stepfather's Apple ][+. I was about ten. Then I got a Commodore 64 and got this awesome program called Gary's Game Kitchen. It had a Sprite editor and you programmed it by writing pseudo code. From there I learned C, then got jobs in Visual Basic and vb for Microsoft office (yuck!). Then I discovered Linux and became a web developer. *Hugs vim*

Started with the TRS80 MC-10 and then went to the Commodore 64. I still have the C-64 in a box in my garage.

On science and religion. Inspied by a comment in another rant, credits to @Commodore and @cjbatz

According to Godel's incompletness theorems, aritmetics is incomplete and inconsistent. Therefore, any science based on aritmetics (dude, like, every) is also.
Therfore, as a mathematician, I must accept that there are things that cannot be proven by current science, and that there are statements that are true and false at the same time in current science.

So, science can't prove religious beliefs? It cant prove P vs NP either. It might someday. Science couldn't prove earth wasn't flat for a looong time. Or Pythagoras theorem.
But more importantly, if science can prove something, doesn't mean it can't prove the exact oposite.

This way of thinking allows for any and all ridiculous beliefs, under the shield of "it might be proven one day" or "doent't mean opposite isn't true also" but kerp in mind that there are complete and consistent sciences and proofs in them. Check if something's been proven to exist or not exist without doubt.

1988 - Age 8 sees a young boy with a Commodore 64 and several copies of commodore format typing in code from the magazine. First program I got to work was a dtmf dialler using to speaker to ring a grandparent. Been hooked ever since

I was born loving it - from as early as scripting small things on the Commodore 64.

how many people started learning to program on a commodore 64?

Actually finishing side projects!
Maybe make a new demoprod?
Learn more C.
Brush up on TI-BASIC, maybe expand to Commodore BASIC.
Learn more Z80ASM.

I started on my commodore 128D by typing over code from magazines. After that I started modifying them a little. Then I started making programs that drew little sketches on the screen using vb lineto commands. All this when I was 10years old.

My first experience…

My father bought a Commodore 64 but couldn’t figure out how to use it. A few days later I was playing games and making art. He yelled at me saying none of it was in the manual. He was mad I understood how to use it. It all came naturally to me, and I early
on realized I had a gift.