I think that I wrote my first program around 1964 or so. My high school girlfriend's dad worked in the computer room at a GE installation nearby. He showed me how to write FORTRAN programs. I would write the statements on coding sheets, he would bring them in to work and have the key punchers render the statements onto 80-column cards. The program would get run on a GE machine (sorry, can't remember the model) and I would get a 132 column printout, with diagnostics if something went wrong.
Fast forward to 1971 or so. Then I was in the US Army trained as a Combat Engineer and assigned to an Engineering Battalion in Germany. There was a computer on a nearby base and the programmer was getting ready to rotate home without a replacement. Some clerk somewhere must have noticed that I took a FORTRAN course in my first year of college (Northeastern) and so I was reassigned to the computer section.
I had two weeks of OJT with the soon-to-be-gone programmer on a UNIVAC 1005 and then I was on my own. After I had been programming for a few months I thought "Hey. This is the shit."
When I got out of the Army I went to UMASS, Amherst and finished up with a BSCS. That was in 1974 and I have been programming more or less continuously ever since. I say more or less because that have been layoffs, company implosions, and a rage quit but I have never been out of work for more than 3 months.
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I think that I wrote my first program around 1964 or so. My high school girlfriend's dad worked in the computer room at a GE installation nearby. He showed me how to write FORTRAN programs. I would write the statements on coding sheets, he would bring them in to work and have the key punchers render the statements onto 80-column cards. The program would get run on a GE machine (sorry, can't remember the model) and I would get a 132 column printout, with diagnostics if something went wrong.
Fast forward to 1971 or so. Then I was in the US Army trained as a Combat Engineer and assigned to an Engineering Battalion in Germany. There was a computer on a nearby base and the programmer was getting ready to rotate home without a replacement. Some clerk somewhere must have noticed that I took a FORTRAN course in my first year of college (Northeastern) and so I was reassigned to the computer section.
I had two weeks of OJT with the soon-to-be-gone programmer on a UNIVAC 1005 and then I was on my own. After I had been programming for a few months I thought "Hey. This is the shit."
When I got out of the Army I went to UMASS, Amherst and finished up with a BSCS. That was in 1974 and I have been programming more or less continuously ever since. I say more or less because that have been layoffs, company implosions, and a rage quit but I have never been out of work for more than 3 months.
And I still love it.
Thank you for sharing. This many years later, can you clearly identify how being a programmer has impacted your life (for better or worse)?