I got to computers a little early for a GenX kid, about age 7. I was thinking about it today, so decided to make notes and share them.
1982-1985 (elementary school):
I attended a private school that had grades K-12. In 3rd grade we got a class computer. I showed an aptitude for coding (I remember creating a little monster drawing and having it walk across the screen) and got sent up with the 12th graders to learn more. (Which didn’t endear me to my classmates, but that’s another story.) Atari computers of some kind. I remember saving my little monster to a cassette drive.
Then my parents bought the family a Commodore 64. I have vague memories of writing in BASIC. Dad used to buy the magazines with programs written in them, and he would occasionally type them out.
About the same time I got accepted into an adult computer course at a university a couple hours’ drive from our house. Mainframe computer, a DEC Rainbow. I don’t remember what language. I do remember that Mom would drive me and sit in the back of the room. We’d always stop at the same gas station and I’d get a grape soda. I usually fell asleep on the drive home, as the class was on a weeknight and I’d had regular school that day.
In 5th grade I went to middle school, and was in the computer club. Apple IIe, I think.
1986-1990: didn’t do anything with computers. Life stuff, including a move to Florida, into a school district with little tech.
1991 (high school): Started dating a slightly older guy, a freshman at the university in town. Students had access to the internet through the campus VAX mainframe network. Also got into BBSes, using friends’ computers as I didn’t own one. Also spent a lot of time in the Mac lab after school.
1992: started dating a much older guy who was a systems admin and gifted coder. He loaned me a dumb terminal and a 300 baud modem, so I could dial into the VAX network from home. My mother would get so mad about me tying up the phone line (as well as ignoring homework) that she’d occasionally lock the keyboard for the terminal in her trunk so I couldn’t use it.
1993-1997: moved in with that guy. He started an ISP out of our house. We had a T-1 connection at home. I learned Linux, C, shell scripting, Perl. When the World Wide Web popped into existence, I learned HTML. I ran one of the first fan fiction sites on the web. Dynamic pages weren’t a thing, so the archive entries were kept in a flat file database. Every night a chron job would run a shell script that rebuilt the HTML pages to include any new stories I’d added to the database, unless I’d already run the script manually. I was pretty proud of that, at the time.
He was also into using computers with amateur radio. So I got my Tech license and played with packet radio, and assembled electronics kits for fun. And, during the time I was still in high school, he loaned me an obsolete TRS-100 that was an early portable computer. It was about the size of a textbook. It had a full keyboard, and the screen was maybe 5 lines of text high. It ran on AA batteries. I used it to take notes in class. I loved that thing.
1997-2001: The dot-com bubble (and post-relationship). I worked for several companies as a web developer. HTML and then a lot of PHP. Also, depending on the job, ASP, JSP, and Perl. There were some MS Office macros in there too, in VisualBASIC. I was making a ridiculous amount of money for a kid with no degree. It was pretty cool.
2001: mostly dropped out of the workforce, between health problems and the dot-com bubble crashing. I still ran web sites and kept up on my web dev skills, and got into database architecture. MySQL, JavaScript, and other things. Changed careers, but then health problems continued…
2010 (I think): Got asked to build a site using WordPress. Have gotten really good at it since then. Back in the beginning I hacked a lot of plug-ins to make things work the way I wanted. I wrote a couple myself, though never released them for public use. Nowadays there are stable releases of so many plug-ins that are better than I stopped writing them, though I really ought to sharpen that skill.
2018: Got certified in Python, because it was fun. I still use it a bunch for automation projects. Also took some classes towards a coding degree, so had courses in C++, Java, and Python.
2019: Built a few Discord bots with Discord.js. A couple of them have very small fan bases. I still maintain them, though haven’t added any features in a while.
I admit that I haven’t kept up on new things like I did when I was younger. I did a class on BootStrap, I built a simple cross-platform Android/iOS app using a phone platform for JavaScript… If I still worked in the field I’d have reason to keep sharp. But these days almost all my coding and dev work are for volunteer gigs. Occasionally I build sites for very small businesses, usually in WordPress, but I’ve also done stuff with Shopify templates, GoDaddy’s page builder, and other things, as requested by clients.
I’ve never thought of myself as a coding genius. I spent too much time around really gifted programmers to consider myself anything more than competent. But I get the job done, and I document my work, and I enjoy the puzzle-solving aspect.
So yeah. I’ve been fucking around with computers for most of my life. I’m glad I have all that experience.
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