My first coding experience was in 1964 when I was in high school. We punched our Fortran code onto rolls of paper tape using a surplus teletype, and then overnight our code would be sent over the telephone lines at a blazing 110 baud. In the morning, if we hadn’t made any fatal errors we would find our output.

Way too slow for me, and I put my computer training on hold until 1973 when I was in graduate school. The situation had improved a bit — we now used state of the art keypunch machines to create our program decks and if the system wasn’t overloaded would sometimes get our results within an hour — but it was still too slow for me. Coding on hold again.

Finally, in 1984 when I was teaching high school I bought an Apple IIe, and all the brakes were off and it was full speed ahead! I quickly taught myself BASIC, was teaching BASIC programming at the high school within a year, mastered Pascal and in two years was teaching AP Computer Science.

I have since written a lot of code in a lot of different languages for a lot of different purposes, but boy, that learning curve was way steep!!

For more, see https://medium.com/@johnnovak_43277/how-i-became-a-nerd-part-1-da8a85637383