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< how did you start dev (for those who do)?

I was given a Commodore VIC-20 when I was a kid. Nominally, I programmed in basic with it, but mainly I made character graphics, typed in games from magazines to play, and played cartridge games from a store that rented them.

My dad had an IBM PC he got for work, and I used it for school. I played some games on it, but it wasn't capable of much, even compared to the VIC-20. It had a 1200 baud modem, and by my senior year in high school, I was going on BBSes and the local university's public dialup telnet server, which I mainly used to telnet to MUDs.

In college I minored in CS, mainly because I had fallen in with a bad crowd of CS majors. Put OS/2 on my 386, played a lot of DOS games, was busy on Usenet just before/during the dawn of the WWW. Went to grad school in something completely different (anthropology), but was porting Unix programs to OS/2 as a hobby and eventually installing Linux. When I was done with classes, I moved so my spouse could go to grad school, got a job as a Linux sysadmin at a web hosting company, and dropped out of grad school.

Since then, I've moved from system administration with system automation coding into pure coding jobs, for a succession of public agencies. Doing web development in a couple of programming languages I don't particularly care for, on a platform that isn't Linux, but it's fine. Keeps a bright line between my work computing and hobby computing.

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~tffb wrote:

Hey ~tatterdemalion, thanks for posting! :)

I had an unlikely crossroads (over time) with old(er) computers and venturing into any type of development - be it web development or fussing with hardware.

In the hardware realm, it actually started with me always feeling that I was clumsy with anything "electric" related or mechanical - then I (unwisely) bought an "EGO 2.0" electronic cigarette (which are trash devices) in 2012, and from the assembly, disassembly, reassembly of that device and it's related chargers and cartomizers and atomizers, and other ephemera, I realized that I wasn't THAT "inept" at fooling with an electronic device. Then in 2015 (out of sheer boredom + personal interest) I asked my brother-in-law if he had a use for an old PC tower he had in his basement, ready to be trashed. He said I could have it, but I would either need a Windows license or put Linux on it. I said "I will figure out Linux", and after a lengthy diatribe, testimony, love-profession of Linux Mint from a friend "R" (who said he used that OS on *everything* in his life), I decided that was the distro to try. I got into the tower's BIOS settings, and was able to boot from a flash drive with Mint (16, Cinnamon (I think)) and was off to the races. Then disassembly/reassembly of that tower to swap out a power supply, then fooling with a few RPi models, and then just a general desire/fascination with hardware since.

Software and (web) development, I shared that in the initial post, haha

Now I am on the Commander X16 forum daily and seeing/learning XYZ about things, and in Jan setting up a type of "retro computing" rig, albeit with an emulation device, not authentic hardware.

In terms of CS, itself, it's a hobby for me. But one I've been fascinated with for several years now. All good fun! :)

~bartender, I'll take a Wild Cherry Pepsi, as it will match the can I have sitting next to me IRL, haha.

And one for ~tatterdemalion, or whatever beverage they prefer :D