Infinite Recursion

Wow, you guys have good memories... I can't remember this morning.

I started writing code in 1989 at the age of 9. The language of choice was Basic (X,GW,Q) on a TRS 80 Color Computer 2 (check it out: http://jasonpowers.net/images/trs80cc2.jpg. The TRS 80 was a family computer, my personal computer that my brother bought for me was a Wang (forgot the model number). On the Wang I picked up Fortran 77 and Turbo Pascal. Forgot the year also... but the screen had orange text and black background and you could watch the pixels light up, that's how old it was. (I still have the 5 1/4" floppy drive out of it).

During Jr High, I wrote in Basic, Fortran, Pascal, HTML, and dbase III Plus.

During High School, I wrote in those as well as C, Visual Basic, and some DOS batch / unix scripting. I worked as an Engineering Aide (contract student) at a US Dept. of Defense facility in their High Performance Computing environment. Mainly coded in C, C++ and Unix Scripts. I worked on Cray Supercomputers and Sun and IBM mainframes often, but primarily worked in my office on an SGI R5000. I graduated high school in the top 5% of my class (with Honors) and left for college the same year.

I went to college where I spent my entire waking moment writing code in one or multiple of the languages below (in no particular order):

C++, Visual C++, Visual Basic, Awk, Sed, Python, Java, Javascript, PHP, Asp, Ada, PL/1, SmallTalk, Tcl/Tk, Cobol, PL/SQL, Modula-3, Perl, VRML, CGI, Lisp, Prolog, VB .NET, C# .NET, C++ .NET, DHTML, CSS, XML, XHTML

I graduated college with a Bachelor's of Science degree in Software Engineering (with Honors) and minors in Geological Science and Computer Science. My emphasis was Artificial Intelligence. My senior project was an intricate business management program which I soon sold commercially after graduating.

~16 years from when I first pressed a button and here I am employed as a software engineer with a US Department of Defense contractor within the same facility I was in years ago... doing various work, most of which I cannot elaborate on. My primary languages are C,C++,C#,PHP,Perl and Bash scripting... platforms are Irix, Solaris, Linux, and yes, Windows.

Note: With all of my knowledge, experience, and education... I still do not claim mastery of any given language. It takes a mighty accomplished person to truly master the field.

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"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

Polyphemus_

I started being interested in programming when I was 7 or 8. I used Visual Basic for Applications for a while, which was automatically installed when you installed ms Office. Using the help files I found everywhere on my computer, I managed to make some useless programs for it.
Then i got, for my birthday i believe, logo and 2 books for it. I used it for a while and switched back to VB, which I had now the full version of - a father from a friend of mine gave it to me.
Then i got, for another birthday i believe a book from my father called 'C++ for Dummies'. The book really sucked, and when I read it now i have to disagree with the writer at points.
I didn't continue with C++ at that time, and found out how VB completely worked - I have wasted about 2 years on the language, still don't know why.
Then, I got a book from the library which I learned C from, after that I learned C++ from the internet (i had broadband connection by that time). I've written a small, not-finished 3d engine with it. I didn't finish it because I started writing my own OS. Before starting the OS, I've learned assembly. Two months ago, I've also learned Java.
Since a year i'm also building websites. With two friends of mine i have a website building company.

Well, that's it i think..

BinaryStorm

@Polyphemus
Just curious.... What features does your OS have?

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LegionZero

I started to learn programming when I was 14 (1992), first Quick-basic, then pascal, then cobol and then I learned C, that is when I got interested in graphic design and animation, I did my very first animation when I was 15. It was a small tank moving across the lawn shooting what everybody said "mouse pellets" but that little animation got me a job at the computer lab of the programming school I was in.

Since being 15 and having a job, you can't actually be employed (not technically) I had no salary but in return programming school was free for the remaining year and I had unlimited access to the school computer lab.

After I left school I got a job doing graphic design and Video editing, forgot all about programming. About 5 years ago my interest in programming got rekindled by MEL the internal pseudo-C code of Alias Wavefront's Maya since then I have now learned python, MEL and javascript.

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Polyphemus_

nothing special yet.. still working on the base of it, and development goes quite slow because i don't work day and night on it anymore.

OpenLoop

Woot, I mastered QBasic when I was 14 and you can make neat games in it. I myself made a few things.

Qbasic was the first language I learned when i was 12 years old, I experimented with GWBasic a little as well. Then I learned DOS Batch scripting arround that age as well. The rest of my knowledge came from my Bachelor's degree. I now know C, C++, C#, VB.NET, VB 6.0(a little),HMTL, PHP, Javascript(a little), Lisp and Prolog(barely remeber it), and Java. I've done couple of applications with ASP.NET as well.

EDIT: @Polyphemus: You created an OS, you mean a PC OS that can boot the PC, do you have a working Beta?

BinaryStorm

@OpenLoop
I know Qbasic can create games. I myself created some things with crappy graphics, bad collision detection, sound, etc...
I wanted to say that you can't make games that someone would want to play.

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Polyphemus_

it has all kind of stuff, multitasking, memory management, hardware manager, filesystem manager, a module loader/manager and more i can't recall that fast atm. when i finish my fat32 driver you will also be able to load executables from disk.

OpenLoop

@ Polyphemus_: So you don't have a working copy yet i guess?
@BinaryStorm: Back in the day, when i was 14, Qbasic's Gorilla was still being played (at least in my old country). But for this day and age, noone would want to program in QBasic.

Ooble

Hmmm... started with C at 12, got into VB (because I could draw the fscking buttons) about two years back, did that for half a year, realised it was crap, and stopped. Since then I've worked mainly on C# and PHP, but a load of C++ mini-projects on the side.

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