Childhood Programming Stories

Same as most of people in my age - there was no internet when I was starting my adventure (roughly 20 years ago). In my particular case it was even funnier - computers were so expensive my family could not afford one until I was 17. But I have fallen in love with them since I have seen them for very first time at the age of 6. I could not play with real computer so I have been reading all available books from the library and in some point at the age of 13 I came across programming books. I loved

Had one when I was 8, learnt programming on it, everything else comes from that.

This is how I got into programming.

Without my mum I probably wouldn’t be programming today. When I was 9-10 years old she gave me a Commodore 64 + printed BASIC book. I remember when I created my first "real" program = number guessing game. In that moment, my beloved programming journey started. Then few years later I switch to Pascal and so on :)

When I was 8 or so I found a book in my school's library about making computer games with BASIC. I tried some of what I learned from the book on our home computer, and after running into some problems, I asked my brother for help, and soon discovered that all of my brothers and my father had done the same thing, and they were all anxious to teach me what they knew. We emigrated and bought a new computer, and my new school didn't have any books on programming and our new computer didn't come with

Starting to tinker with programming at a very young age.

I first got into programming when I was around 13. I wanted to make games (little did I know how big an order that was!). So eventually I stumbled upon code that looked a lot like this, and I started hacking it out. I would tweak things until I understood why it was there, and then move on. I guess since I didn't know that something better existed it was the only world I knew. I had a lot of fun playing around. What a different world we live in now though. Stuff that would have took m

I learned to program on my dad's commodore 64 when I was 7 by modifying the source code of nibbles and the game where a gorilla threw bananas. A few years later I was making "AI" chat programs that just used giant 'if' blocks to anticipate every possible word or phrase I could think of and spit out a response. I credit that early naive programming experience for teaching me self-actualization. I could change the world. A tiny insignificant piece of it, but 7-10 year old

I had a C64 and learned programming on it. I guess it's a question of destiny at this point :)

I was introduced to the basics of programming at 15 but it only really clicked at late 16. Before that I was really interested in electronics and aeronautics/fluid dynamics/aircraft design, but those all went into the backburner when programming came along.In particular, I got really into Robocode - see http://robowiki.net - the community is still active 10+ years later and the state of the art is still being pushe