Personally, I started off with Roblox back in the early 2010s, and taught myself Lua. I really liked those Tycoon games, and wanted to see how they worked.
I eventually found Minecraft (like every kid back in the day did), and learnt Java to make Bukkit server mods.
Around 2016 I thought websites were kinda cool, so I started learning HTML, CSS, and JS, and I’ve been in the web dev space ever since.
What about the rest of y’all? What’s your personal programming path?
My father bought a Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80. I was mesmerized by it. I created basic programs on it.
Then we eventually got a 486DX2 IBM Compatible and I programmed little fantasy adventures.
Those actually built up so that when I was in high school and had a math test I realized my TI-82 was similiar to what I knew and I was able to program my calculator with all of the math equations to spit out the answers for me. This had approvals from my teacher.
I never became a developer, but I still enjoy looking at code and investigating it.
Super cool of your teacher to allow that!
Going from a TRS-80 to a 486 must’ve been like going from a tricycle to a starship.
Yeah the TRS-80 was an oddity that barely worked. The 486 really got me into computing and just loved all of it.
The 486 was remarkable in that it packed a lot of features onto a single chip, including privilege levels, memory protection, virtual memory, floating-point arithmetic, and a 32-bit address space. These were once features you’d only find in a big-iron machine from IBM or DEC. Even when they did become available in smaller computers, like the Motorola 68000 series, they still tended to require additional chips to implement them, like the Motorola 68851 memory management unit and 68881 floating-point unit. The 486 had all that stuff built in. Motorola was behind, but not by much: they matched the 486’s features a year later with the 68040.
Intel wasn’t always neck-and-neck Motorola, though. When the 68000 was released in 1979, it was even more revolutionary: it was one of the first 32-bit microprocessors, and very fast for its day. IBM engineers wanted to use that for the IBM PC, but if I recall correctly, management wanted Intel instead because they already had a deal, so they went with the more primitive, 16/20-bit Intel 8088 instead.
And that’s a shame. Had they used the 68000, PC DOS would have been 32-bit from the start, and the infamous 640kB limit would never have existed.