131–140 of 162 posts
Because on Windows machines there was queue of people that waiting, nix terminals was mostly free because students was unexperienced.
So i take opportunity always to sit on "free" terminal and i start learning *nix. Soon i learn pine, pico, lynx, X and many other.
And today - 23 years later i never regret about this decision.
A girl broke my heart, I dramatically (I was 22) plugged "Why aren't nerds popular," into Google, found PG's essay ( http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html ), read the other ones, and decided to become a Lisp Jedi.
Has the situation changed?
This group isn't exactly the nerd clique of the 90s. Motivations of this group are driven by status-seeking, both among peers and college admissions officers, unlike the pure passion motivation nerds of the 90s are known for. But this group offers a realistic path of a 90s-style nerd to popularity.
I ended up downloading Ubuntu, created a bootable USB and managed to fish out my documents from the disks. Fast forward to today, and I'm part of an Ops team running and developing software to manage around 10K Ubuntu servers across several colocations.
I don't have children (yet), but for the parents out there - push your kids to tinker with technology, don't just buy a new one when it breaks. For me it started out with breaking and assembling back almost every toy my parents bought me, to understand its internals. Please nurture this instinct.
Linux, my introduction to UNIX was via Xenix during high school, where a PC tower was shared among the whole class, and we had to prepare our UNIX exercises on MS-DOS 5 computers.
When I arrived at the university, the campus was running mixing a mix of DG/UX and SunOS servers for UNIX programming classes. By accident I got hold of the the "Linux Unleashed" book during 1995's Summer, which made my life much easier by not having to travel 1h into the campus and wait for free terminals.
After my degree I actually spent most of the time with commercial UNIXes, then eventually went back to Windows as my main computing platform.
Still use Linux on the server and naturally as the kernel powering my Android devices, but not as heavy as during my engineering degree and UNIX related assignments.
My biggest tip to anyone who wants to get started would be to find a project you love and then build it. But be extremely realistic. There's no shame in building pong and then going to the process of releasing it on Android. If instead you want to build Tekken 8 super hitbox edition, you're going to find yourself quickly frustrated as you bump into limitations of a time and skill. The enemy of good is perfection.
I'll also say avoid getting involved in any projects where there's tons of team members but you're the only programmer, these people are going to ultimately end up thinking that despite not adding a whole lot they're just as valuable as you are and you'll grow to resent them.
My perfect side project team is generally myself as the programmer, and then a single artistic or business-minded partner. This partner will keep you grounded, and there's a ton of validation which gets delivered once you ship it to them . However when you start dealing with teams of 10 or 12 people you have a bunch of these people throwing out their stupid ideas about how you need to build the best thing ever which needs to implement what took Facebook you know hundreds of millions of dollars to build. You'll quickly get frustrated and you'll ultimately leave the project.
Finally remember to enjoy this s*, even if I was working at Starbucks I'd probably still work on games in my spare time. To be clear working on games in my spare time wow I was unemployed and dropping out of college is what led to my career today. Programming is a gift, oh yeah start with an easy language.
JS and Python being good choices. C# isn't too bad assuming we're talking about Unity and not traditional .net
Tech, I got my introduction into computing with the Timex 2068, a Speccy clone, during the mid-80's, then followed up with a professional education during high school as computing technician, and finally ended up doing a degree in Informatics Engineering. Linux, my introduction to UNIX was via Xenix during high school, where a PC tower was shared among the whole class, and we had to prepare our UNIX exercises on MS-D…
Bottom line: Encouraging kids works!
Unfortuantly the only computer I had (not counting the family PC) was a laptop with 4MB of RAM (effectively less than 4). The installation required booting one floppy disk containing the kernel, then swapping and loading another disk containing the installer. And course the machine ran out of memory during this process. I spent days learning how to compile a custom kernel that excluded the things I didn't need, until it was small enough to fit in memory and succesfully install it.
I think that's when I got hooked.
1965, sixteen years old, learned FORTRAN at a summer Math Camp. Walked off the street and got a programming job with an insurance company in 1970 (Assembler).
Well, my first system was ЭВМ ЕС-1033 (soviet clone of IBM S/360) back in 1988 and I was twelve. Me and a friend of mine we used to attend a local HAM radio club where we studied electronics, soldered radio receivers and other simple electonic devices (hoping to build an HF transmitter one day of course). For that we needed many electronic parts that were in great deficiency at that time. One summer of 88 we had been leaning around the city and decided to walk in to nearby multistorey building with "lots of air conditioners" stucking from its windows - the idea was to ask for used/discarded electronics which we can tear apart in search for required components (we looked for FET transistors mostly). We never walked into front door of such buildings, but rather sneaked into back doors instead. Once we got in, we immediately got caught by a woman in white robe who asked what we kids had been doing there. We told her that we are in seek of used electronics for our projects in the club. She got friendly, asked us about the club a little, then requested to follow her. Walking thoughout innumerous corridors, halls and elevators, finally she brought us into a huge room with walls made of glass, it was stuffed with different devices blinking lights of all kinds and it was full of people in white robes as well. She got us to a bearded guy telling our story. It appeared that guy was a chief of Computational Department (Вычислительный Центр) of the institution we intruded into. The guy also inquired about our amateur projects, then, before brining us to their storage of spare electronic parts, he led a brief tour around the machine room explaining things about terminals, CPUs, memory, tapes, disk drives and programs. In the end he told us to come back the other day, when he presumably would have more time to explain about computers, if we are interested. Of course I had been heard about computers before, we have had a couple of ATARIs in the club, also another friend of mine was soldering his own computer (Радио РК86), but that was the first time I saw a real machine. REAL! I was so much fascinated, so next day in the morning I was there again. I had been intruduced to a team of programmers, who mostly were very kind young women, and to some electronics guys. I remember I was asking lots of stupid questions and one gal handed me a heavy printout entitled FORTRAN, made on a peforated paper. Since than, electronics became my sencond point of interest. I became a very frequent visitor of the Department (I lived there I would say), two years later as I turned 16, I was officially employed as an operator, then as a programmer.
In 1991 the machine was dismantled and thrown away in favour of IBM PCs. So, I quickly learnt MS-DOS, Norton, etc, and began to programe in C/C++ (Borland C) and assembly. In 1992, I learnt what MODEM is, I spent lots of time surfing BBSed, and joined Fidonet, which made me abandon DOS in favour of OS/2. Using OS/2 I could run Fidonet node CM on my working PC (386DX2-66). In 1996, Internet came to town, so I learnt about networking and FreeBSD, which is my OS #1 till this day. I'm not fond of Linux at all, although I run Ubunut/Kodi on my home media center and I do a lot of programming for Linux based embedded.
I'm very much grateful to people at Computing Department for that they did not kick me back to streets in the beginning, for the time they spent on nursing me, patiently explaining very complex things an concepts, and of course for giving free access to the machine which I hung many many times erasing whole system from the disk. :-)