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#CheckIn @s banerian @Andrew Pam @Amanda Gordon @Christoph S @Griff Ferrell @hackbyte (friendica) 13HB1 @David Sterry @robb @Guy Geens @Joseph Teller @Susan ✶✶✶✶ @Whuffo @smellsofbikes @Richard @Rob Anybody @Michele Hax @Nora Qudus @Isaac Kuo @Lesley @Carsten Raddatz @Muse @Bob Lai @Mark Wollschlager @Doug Senko @Alexander @Cass @Tom Wroblewski @su ann lim @Lily J @Phil Landmeier (ᚠ) @Michael Warburton @pianomad @Griff Ferrell 💙💛 diasp.org @Miguela @Klaus Lademann @Joltrast @Alrekr Járnhandr @Jacob C @garpu @That Harp Guy @Daniel @David Calderon @Corinne Howell @Christian Nalletamby @Cats of Commons 💫 @Andreas G @John MacLeod @libramoon @Aline @klausman @davidamerland @gregg taylor @Holly Jahangiri @Phil Setnik @Dave Higgins [Main Account] @Lisa Stranger @Lee Rothstein @Deb Zaccaro-Rojas @Stan McCann (Uncle Pirate) @debo @Nat Weaver 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @Cade Johnson @Debbie D. 🇨🇦 🇩🇪 @Lewis Luminos @tomgrzybow @V. T. Eric Layton @John Douglas Porter @Joyce Donahue @Samuel Smith @Janet Logan 🏳️‍⚧️ @Jodi @Katherine Bond @Kenny Chaffin @Jay Bryant @Jess Nut @Beej Cobalt @Jon Alcibar (main) @((( David "Kahomono" Frier ))) @roddio @Karl Auerbach @Paul Ferguson @pedrosubrosa @sheilanagig @deanc @John Hummel @Don Little @Chele @⭐ Vinny ✔️ @tomgrzybow @Alistair McHarg
Muse
First, today! ❤
tomgrzybow
I got into IT via Forestry. Seriously. In order to get my Masters in Forestry, I had to take a course in FORTRAN. And that was the beginning.

This was in 1982.
((( David "Kahomono" Frier )))
My very first programming language was Focal, and FORTRAN IV followed soon after.
tomgrzybow
FORTRAN IV on cards!
smellsofbikes
A friend said you're old when you're doing more things for the last time than for the first time. I'm not yet old, by that criterion.
tomgrzybow
I'm still doing many things for the first time... unless I forgot.
Andrew Pam
I initially had to learn FORTRAN entirely theoretically from my math book in school because the only student computers were Apple ][s for which we didn't have FORTRAN. I just submitted programs to the teacher who graded them based on his inspection of the code. Later I went to a school that did have a PDP-8, an LSI-11 and a card reader so we could actually put our programs on cards and execute them. That allowed us to learn FOCAL (and I think SNOBOL and MUMPS) in addition to assembly, BASIC and FORTRAN.
Joyce Donahue
Not the technology end, but I was an early user. I got to be a student "guinea pig" for the experimental PLATO learning system (terminals attached to the university mainframe) in 1971. They paid us to come into the computer lab to take multiple choice tests - and the reward was a very, very slow orange-on-black screen game of Pong. 😀

Mostly I get respect for being oldest, but sometimes I have had to work to be quicker and smarter to compensate.
Lisa Stranger
I remember Sharpies and cards but not what language it was. We had to ride a bus a half hour or so to the rich kids' high school to run them through the single computer owned by the school system.
Cass
Since I have a December birthday I was used to being the youngest. I had hired a new tech and her dad was younger than me and was retiring. Quite the reminder that time moves on.
Jay Bryant
My first programming was wiring together circuits. Then it was FORTRAN 77 on punch cards. Then C and C++ and Java, with Lisp and a dozen other languages in there. Also half a dozen markup languages.

Not bad for an English major who backed into programming through Linguistics (I took all the Linguistics course the U offered).
pedrosubrosa
I remember when I realized that I was the oldest person subcontracting for the same company when it came to co-workers. And owner. You don't see too many middle aged people doing forestry fieldwork because it can be a bit of a shitkicking physically. A career for someone in their 20s or 30s. At about 55, I had to cut back to a 4 day fieldwork week as I wouldn't otherwise recover over a 2 day weekend. At 57 my career was over due to work injuries. With up to 4 hours driving every day, 4 days still meant about 50 hours of work/travel a week. 1/2 day mapping/paperwork on Friday or Monday. Can't say I miss it.
Christoph S
Good morning at university I was 3 years older because I did 3 years training on the v job before.
Karl Auerbach
Old? Well, we had the first color TV in the neighborhood - it was an engineering prototype with all the nasty high voltage stuff on the outside. The whole neighborhood would come over to watch the one color show on the tube "Our Mr. Sun" (link below)

As for computers - My first were an IBM 7094 and an IBM 360/91 at UCLA circa 1968. My first program was in PL/1 and it took me forever to get it to work on the 360/91. But I had hands on access to the 7094 and got to play and play and play. (In both cases the programs were on punch cards - 026 for the 7094 and 029 for the 360.)

I can use a Curta. (You don't know what a Curta is?!!? Google it to see one of the worlds most wondrous little machines.)

Andreas G
Before there was Magic: The Gathering, there was Fortran IV on Cards.
Lisa Stranger
I was used to being the youngest
Now I realize why I was having trouble answering this question. I, too, end up at the other end of the scale. I was 6 years younger than my closest sibling, skipped a grade in school so I was perpetually the youngest in my class, married an older man, etc. Hence my comment on a recent checkin that I'm not allowed to be old.
((( David "Kahomono" Frier )))
@tomgrzybow
FORTRAN IV on cards!
Well, duh!
@tomgrzybow
Carsten Raddatz
I'm not the oldest in the group of friends, or with coworkers. Or here, hah. 😀)

FORTRAN is what was in the magazines when I got interested, so I had heard of it early on, for some definitions of early ≈ period of 1985-1989. It had zero practical relevance for me tho.

However my first baby steps were BASIC as that came with the C128 family got, and the freaking ringbinder manual detailing all the commands was good enough to build a two-joystick two-sprite and collision logic minigame. That was the start.

2244040


(The manual is an approximation too, as I can't seem to find a photo the BASIC 7.0 one I think I used.)

After primary school a version of PASCAL ca. 1991 that was taught on something mainframe in the teacher's room and multiplex terminals in another.

When I revisited the place in 2004 for a local Python users meetup that was all gone, except for one teacher who felt old, he told me that.
Jodi
Well... in 1969.....
Deb Zaccaro-Rojas
I was the only person in my IT dept who knew squat about IT - I worked there to manage software and hardware maintenance contracts. still know nothing about 'computer languages' - altho my five years younger than me husband does. He started out working on NYS PD computers on software. He was 18.
deanc
I learned BASIC on a TRS-80 bought with $500 inheritance from my grandmother. Went on to eventually get paid to program in BASIC, C/C++, Perl. I'm pretty good at R and am poking about in Rust.
Mark Wollschlager
I was roughly the same age as everyone else, except for the owners, when I started getting paid to do IT.
When I left I was the oldest, most of the new hires were 35 years younger than me.
They had lots of questions, but mostly about how they could skip the "grunt work" and go straight to managing systems from a dashboard all day.
Lisa Stranger
ohai, fellow Trash80 owner!
Andrew Pam
I also learned BASIC on a friend's TRS-80 Model I Level 1, the first one in Australia which he personally brought back from the US before they were available here. But I never owned one myself; the first computer I owned myself was a Commodore VIC-20, the first in a series that eventually lead to Carsten's C128.
Jodi
My brother had a Trash80

The family computer was this:

enter image description here
Lisa Stranger
I did a thing! Mr. Stranger's bathroom door is MCM-small and he's constantly bashing into it trying to get in and out. It was crying for offset hinges.

Did Ace have them?
nope
Orange big box? nope
Blue big box? nope

Ended up ordering them from MallWart (!) for $13 a damn piece WTF. They are at least nice heavy solid brass. They showed up a couple of days ago, but I had to wait for both of us to be up in bright daylight to get the swap done. Pins wouldn't come out of either set, so I had to wing it a bit. And if I ever find our chisels, they need a bit of remedial wood removal. But they're on and he now has about 2" more clearance in the bathroom 💪

Now I'm debating whether to grab a nap or find something else to do to keep myself awake til close of business (when they call and tell me what time to show up tomorrow morning to blast my after-cataracts).
Joseph Teller
I bought my first computer in 1978, a Model I TRS-80 with money I had earned over a 2 year period in the workforce (yeah I was working from Freshman High School onward, my family was very much low middle class). I had my first programming (BASIC) class in 1977 but had to learn from remote on a Teletype machine (300 Baud dedicated line from the High School over to Bentley College). The School got their first 2 Monochrome CRTs in 1978. I was in the last class in the school that Keypunch training was a required class as part of the 'Business Machines' coursework that was a prerequisite for computer related courses.
deanc
I was in my town's first high school physics class that didn't use slide rules. I had inherited my great-grandfather's slide rule and learned how to use it and was thus somewhat disappointed. GG had been a county surveyor, backwoods goldbug guide (there had been a micro gold rush locally, why not get some dough outta the marks), metallurgist. I suspect it is still around here somewhere, among the boxes of things that get moved but not unpacked.
stefani banerian
science was my background.
i programmed in Pascal for my thesis, to do data crunching and modelling.
and then used the text editor to write it up.
Pascal, at that point, was the 5th language i had used (after focal, basic, fortran, and C)
since then i've done Lisp/Scheme, C++, java, python, et al.
we used Racket for formal verification.
and most recently, python for a lot of "glue" to get various systems working together.
and then i've also been alpha/beta testing for a group, who does everything with Rust/cargo
Lisa Stranger
Surgery center has already called—I'm scheduled for zero-dark-twenty (which is 10 minutes earlier than their door says they open?! yes I confirmed)—so I can nap when ready. And I'm just about ready!
((( David "Kahomono" Frier )))
Since my full-time professional career started in 1979, I always had all the computers I wanted at work. I didn't buy a personal computer of any stripe until 1984, it was an IBM-PC compatible by Leading Edge. I was already adept in Basic, FORTRAN, PL/1, COBOL and Honeywell GMAP (assembler) by then.
Isaac Kuo
I didn't know I knew so many people who started out with Fortran. I started with Fortran on an IBM 3033 mainframe when I was 9 and I didn't really "get" exactly what I was doing. Mainly I was just plotting stuff to create pictures, using commands designed for graphing scientific plots and such. I'd plan out what I wanted to plot on graph paper, and then write out a program with the commands necessary to generate the plot. This was all on a time sharing batch system with multiple CRT terminals (text only, but you could preview plots rendered in asterisks).

At the time, I had no exposure to home computers.

I didn't use punch cards, but I did see punch card machines.
stefani banerian
some utilities are still using Fortran.
there is a Monte Carlo simulation program I used to deal with that was pretty much the standard for some areas of physics
((( David "Kahomono" Frier )))
In high school I was in a youth group that had a massive national convention each year. One region would be named Region Of The Year at a banquet on the last night.

The 1973 New England region was expecting this honor. They had brought a lot of confetti to celebrate when it was announced. Oh wait, did I say "confetti"? Sorry, I meant the output of IBM 029 card punch machines' chad boxes. They had filled up three paper grocery bags with punch card chad. You know how sticky and get-in-everything ordinary confetti is? Punch card chad is much, much worse.

This was June of my junior year. I was still finding that sh** in some of my clothes and luggage in my sophomore year of college.

OBTW, the organization was invited never to return to that hotel for its convention.
Mark Wollschlager
The punch outs from paper tape were very sharp, not good confetti. Learned experience.
Richard
Holy buckets. What isn't an "I'm old" moment? Whether it's the body changes, the ever increasing aches and pains, blood in the toilet, asking younger people to repeat themselves and explain what the heck they're talking about, people with sub 10k word vocabularies asking me to repeat myself and explain what the heck I'm talking about, etc. etc.

Get off my landlord's lawn!
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