A response to a request for everyone to share how they got started down the road to become software developer.

I wrote my first code on a Kaypro II.  My mother bought it around 1987, and there were 2 things you could do on it.  You could use the word processor (I think it was WordStar) or you could program in some variant of BASIC.  I did a little of both.

My mother had a handful of programming books left over from getting her Associates degree a few years earlier, and I would copy some of the sample applications, or try to do some of the problems in some of the chapters.  Between the things the books left out and the bugs I added while hunting and pecking the code into the computer I had plenty of debugging to do.  In some ways I wish I had some of that code, but mostly I’m glad the evidence has been destroyed.

Next my mother bought an IBM pc running Windows.  My recollection was 3.1, but I’m almost certain I got it before 1992 so who knows?  I don’t remember how much ram it had, maybe a couple of MB?  I do remember the disk was 25mb.

The first challenge with that was to try to get this one flight simulator running on it.  I spent weeks modifying the autoexec.bat and config.sys on a boot disk to loaded the absolute bare minimum into memory and get every configured just right to be able that flight sim.  Then I spent countless hours playing purchased and/or pirated games and playing in Q-Basic.

Around that same time I got a programmable calculator for my high school math class.  I started writing programs to do the math problems for me.  I still had to show the work, but I could be certain the answer was correct.  I also created a simple black jack game and a two player howitzer game with random landscape and wind.

All that and I chose sports medicine as my major in college?  Yup.  How I got from sport medicine back to software development would be a whole post in itself.

So really, it was my Mom who got me started down this path.  She not only bought the computers, but she taught me how to debug.  How to work through the problems.  How to go step by step until you see where things where things go wrong.  Skills I still use every day.

Thanks Mom.

What’s your story?