I took a programming class senior year high school, 1975. We programmed via mechanical teletypes connected to the school district's mainframe via acoustic couplers where you put a phone handset into the cup things. We "stored" our programs on paper punched tape, and turned our rolls in for assignments. It was kind of interesting but it didn't really get me then.
Joined the Navy, did telephones and gyrocompasses. My first job out of the Navy was for a military contractor, and part of our contract was keeping engineering studies up to date. All paper based, and if you changed one thing then you had to flow it all through again, manually, on a new form. Or use whiteout. It drove me insane.
So I taught myself how to program the department's minicomputer (don't remember the machine or the language). Now we could make one change and the program would flow it through and print out a fresh new paper for inclusion in manual folders. Wheee ha!
I quickly figured out that that was much more interesting than my actual job, so I quit and went to school.
David Blaine (yes, the magician guy). I saw his first TV show when I was a teenager and got interested in magic. I started collecting magic secrets that I found online and built a site to serve as a repository for card sleights-of-hand.
On my first job at an internet cafe, business was slow, so I took the liberty of building a website for it. The owner got happy and told some other people that I could build sites. And then people started paying me to build their sites. I learned Flash, PHP and Javascript as I went (yes, Flash was big back then).
After I got a more fundamental grasp on programming, I started to learn about more advanced stuff on my free time (reading about algorithms, different programming languages, design patterns, etc).
Now I make a pretty decent living with a interesting job, get occasional unsolicited job offers, and I have an open source project that people keep saying they like ( http://lhorie.github.io/mithril ).
I was working as an IT guy at a TV station in Utah back in 2012. I was approached one day by the senior graphics designer at the station, who figured I had too much free time on my hands.
He offered me a challenge:
Build something to parse the weather data we receive in .csv format everyday, and then display the correct weather background loop for the weather guy.
I took him up on it. I learned enough Java (to be fair, I had taken an intro to CS class a year or two prior) to cobble together a GUI based program that would send commands via TCP to the VizRT servers (commercial graphics system for broadcasters) and that would control which background clip (sunny, rainy, snowy, etc.) would play. I would read in the .csv file and then extract out the info I needed to determine which clip to play.
I expanded the program to monitor the VizRT servers. It would ping them and if no reply was received I would display the server IP, and highlight it in red to signify an error.
This little side project is what really set me off on the course to learning programming for real. I started looking into alternative education and learned about Dev Bootcamp, a coding school in San Francisco.
Long story short I started learning to program ruby on my own, I applied to Dev Bootcamp, got in, graduated this past March, and I'm now currently on the job hunt. This entire process took just over a year. I've now won hackathons in languages I wasn't even taught (objective-c) and I attend a bunch of local meetups and learn more about programming every day.
I kept a blog for most of this journey, which can be viewed at http://www.rickarubio.com if you'd like to read more about how I transitioned into programming.
Friendster. It was the time when overlay layouts in Friendster was a thing. I was in high school that time and I want to impress my friends. I researched about overlay layouts and found a site where you can download and modify them. I wanted more, I want an overlay layout for myself. Not just anything that was downloaded in the internet. I learned that HTML is the way to do it. I studied HTML through PageTutor (http://www.pagetutor.com/html_tutor/index.html). It was the best tutorial I found.
After successfully created my overlay layout, I decided to create a website for our group of friends. I then uploaded it in Freewebs (now http://www.webs.com/). My teacher saw that site and ask me to join a competition. I won awards and made it up to 6th place in the national competition.
That was my realization. I realize that I can do and I want something like this. I decided to take up Computer Science in college. Learned how to code and that was it.
1983, 8th grade. I was in wood-shop class and my teacher asked a friend and me if we'd rather be in "computer shop" (I think we were acting up and he was sick of us). First program was on a Commodore PET, drawing on the screen via POKEs to the video area in memory.
Got hooked and for X-mas a couple of months later, my mom got me a TRS-80 color computer.
Middle school early 1980's.
BASIC in gifted class on a Tandy computer. I don't remember the model (it had an affixed CRT monitor). I was so impressed that I saved up all summer and bought a TSR-80 color which hooked to the television. I think it was like $180 which was all summers lawn mowing money. I was 13. It was awesome.
I deviated into other fields and although I have been Linux enthusiast for a long time, finally came back to programming about 4 years ago, first as a hobby, then as people I knew needed some stuff that I knew I could write, professionally. I haven't looked back since (although I was making more money before... I really love programming and don't want to do anything else anymore... damn you TSR80!)
Around 1983, I went with a friend into an electronics department store. He typed following lines onto the screen: 10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10. Pressed run and walked away.
When I was a little kid in Venezuela, my dad got us our first computer for home, it ran DOS 6.1 and my mom couldn't get the commands in english. So I spent a few days writing a translation of it using batch files that would change "COPY" and "DEL" to "COPIA" and "BORRA". That got me hooked.
I had a frustrating work environment where we didn't have access to the tools we needed to do our jobs. We did however have access to a variety of scripting languages. So i learned to code in order to make the tools we needed and enjoyed it more than the original job i was doing.
That's all there was to home computers at the time. A BASIC REPL. There wasn't much else to do except play around with it and hand-type BASIC programs from computer magazines.
I remember in 1982, or 1983, the family was given a 48k Spectrum, with a bunch of cassette tapes, for Christmas.
Unfortunately the tape-player was broken, and because this was back in the 80s in the UK there was basically zero chance of catching the store open and getting an exchange made until the new-year.
So the new computer enthusiasm was killed in my sisters, and I enjoyed myself reading the manual, and typing in examples from it, then later games from magazines, and similar.
That's what fuelled my programming: Typing in code on a ZX Spectrum, then later writing my own in BASIC and then z80 machine code. From there I graduated to machine-code/assembly on the PC, Java, C, etc.
I assume I'd have been curious how the black-box worked eventually anyway, but I do wonder how things would have turned out if we'd had a working cassette player all those years ago.
Making Unreal Tournament mutators in junior high and working on a few mods after that. Unfortunately I never did much with the game programming stuff after high school.
Joined the Navy, did telephones and gyrocompasses. My first job out of the Navy was for a military contractor, and part of our contract was keeping engineering studies up to date. All paper based, and if you changed one thing then you had to flow it all through again, manually, on a new form. Or use whiteout. It drove me insane.
So I taught myself how to program the department's minicomputer (don't remember the machine or the language). Now we could make one change and the program would flow it through and print out a fresh new paper for inclusion in manual folders. Wheee ha!
I quickly figured out that that was much more interesting than my actual job, so I quit and went to school.