Got a VIC-20 for Christmas in 1982, and the excellent Programmers' Reference Guide a few months later. Later, my high school had a partnership with a local university, so I was able to get an account on their VAX/VMS systems, and access to their labs and even dial-up access.
Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
51–60 of 162 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#52I'm 31, when I was 12 my dad gave me his old Pentium 100MHz, because he bought himself a new PC.
I was hooked immediately - I wanted to make games so I stole(after getting a hard "no" upon asking) a few CDs from PC magazines from my dad and started installing any software that would catch my attention.
My first lines of code were a result of reverse-engineering a "family homepage" - something one could generate in the original Sims game - I think I made an image change its source URL on hover or something like that.
Unfortunately my potato PC had a radiator issue so any serious work could only be done in the middle of winter with the window wide open - otherwise after 20 minutes or so I would get random errors, restarts etc.
Later I got a floppy disc from school with the Logo platform and a book about Pascal + CD from my friend and a CD with MS FrontPage.
Having obtained these tools and with the radiator fixed I almost failed a year in school, because I already found my calling and homework was a distant second priority.
Looking back I regret I didn't have an internet connection until 2007 or so.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#53I was a bored 13 year old in the mid-90s who had spent too much time reading old issues of Phrack and C programming manuals. Linux represented a big, mysterious system and I had nothing but time. I got a job working at Erol's Internet when I was 14 and met some other (older) nerds there who were willing to let me tag along to 2600 meetings (and occasionally, raves) in Arlington and DC. I was active on bbs.l0pht.com and english.gh0st.net, and the folks I met on those boards genuinely helped point me in the right direction.
Eventually my interests shifted and I finally misspent my youth in my early 20s. Pushing 40 now and Linux and programming doesn't feel all that mysterious or exploratory or new any more, but it pays the bills. I wish I could recapture that feeling of rebellion, revolution, or of doing something new. I know though that it's just me who has changed.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#54I was interested with computers since first contact in 1982. I had an MSX from 1985 on which I learned BASIC, then wrote my own assembler (because commercial ones were too expensive).
Some years later, having busted in University, I was an unpaid intern assistant sound engineer in the studio that recorded my band's album (we didn't sold it much). I've started working with digital audio (Sound Designer II, anyone? then Opcode Studio Vision).
At some point for some reason the studio started contracting development work. We were supposed to do the sound design and music for some interactive touch-screen kiosk systems (around 1994), and for some reason (maybe some failed contractor) we finally took care of the whole development, using Scala (not the same as today's Scala, but some sort of Macromedia Director predecessor) on Amiga machines, which I did.
Then I had my first contact with Unix when we developed an Interactive Voice Response program (those were all the rage in the mid 90s). We did the audio part, then the programming itself. It was running on a SCO Unix machine (1995) and the logic used some sort of weird BASIC.
Fast forward to 1996. I was working in TV still as an assistant sound engineer (but paid, this time). I discovered SGI IRIX and fell in love at first sight. I then installed Slackware Linux 2.x on a spare PC found at work.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#55My dad handed me a 2x4" newspaper cutout about this 'Linux' thing back around 1997.
I was already messing with computers and Windows around then as I was starting university, and from then it became a hobby, area of study, career. I've gone from running Linux servers to describing them in Cloudformation definitions! Still using Linux on my desktop.
Made a good circle of friends from the local LUG and associated IRC channel. I met my now wife whilst she was over from abroad studying, and the channel welcomed her joining the chat when she went home for her final year. We've all known each other for 20+ years now.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#56We got our first computer (an 8086) at home almost when it first came out. We were a PC/MSFT home (as was most of Europe). Didn't dabble with Linux until the late 90s, when I painfully installed SuSE. It was a hard time trying to get all your random devices getting to work on Linux back then. Let me tell you, it was a moment of bliss when ubuntu first came out. Aside of building and deploying docker files, I haven't played much with Linux in the last decade. The mac has the perfect blend of a great GUI with a Linux-y terminal and compiler tools.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#57I became a programmer because Travelocity couldn't hire competent front-end developers. I was hired on October 2007 as a designer. They had plenty of designers. After 3 months of doing very little work I was reassigned to a developer position and told to figure it out. I figured it out because I wanted to remain employed so that I could continue to pay my rent and feed my children. In hindsight this experience has pr…
> Many people who perform front-end development never seem to figure it out. They are dependent upon a collection of tools to do large portions of their job for them.
Do not feel bad about it. This practice applies as much to the back end development, the whole of programming, and human experience in general. There is only as deep as you can go. I would never be able to build a computer from electronic parts and bootstrap even a simple operating system from scratch.
If I understand you correctly is what you probably mean is that many developers approach their job mechanistically, without getting into understanding of the parts of the knowledge that would allow them be much better at what they do.
To that I say - it is because of immense and fast growing demand and the fact that FE development sits on the very top of one of the most complicated infrastructure stacks in human history.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#58I got a thinkpad when I was 10 years old, found my first use for it when world of warcraft was released a few weeks later. Recovering from World of Warcraft addiction at age 12 (having spent the time fully immersed all day every day) caused me to read B.F. Skinner's research. I was quite shocked reading about the Skinner boxes and felt empathy for the mice after having been trapped in one myself. By coincidence I wen…
Question: do you still play games? If so, how much? I absolutely love gaming, but I can really lose myself in it, and also sometimes think about what I could do if I would spend these hours on for example learning (I'm a web dev). Sometimes I think about quitting gaming entirely and spending that time on programming projects/learning entirely for fun. At the same time I like gaming, but I have a hard time not getting immersed in it.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#59It was 1993 and I was homeless, living in a squat, working for bands by selling T-shirts at their gigs - I'd hitch hike to where they played to get paid £20 for the night before sleeping rough nearby. During this I collected names and addresses of their fans so that if the bands got new T-shirts there was the potential to contact the fans and let them know. One of the bands - Elastica - wanted to shoot a music video…
Such a story! this is very inspiring and I would like to read what happened next!
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#60I built my first computer when I was in middle school so I could play video games. I thought the people who hung out on Slashdot were pretty cool, so I decided to learn Perl so I could build my own website, because that's what people talked about doing. It turned out to be harder than I thought. I never figured out how to actually build a CGI (and in retrospect, I was pretty far from understanding how the web really worked) but I managed to learn a little something about programming. I remember writing Perl programs to do my math homework for me. I gave up on learning more Perl because I was working through a book (llama book I think?) that had three chapters in a row devoted to regular expressions. I couldn't get through all three.
I got into Linux when Ubuntu Breezy Badger and I read that it was an "idiot proof" version of Linux. Spent way too much time copy and pasting commands from forums over the next few years but I remember having a lot of fun with Compiz.