13 September 2019 - 10 August 2022
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My first foray into programming came when I read an Encyclopedia Brown book (I think that's what it was), in which the child detective solved a mystery by writing a program in BASIC. Then I took a bus down to Cincinnati's downtown public library and got myself a textbook in BASIC.
I quickly discovered that programming in BASIC was very difficult if you don't have a computer. I messed around with creating programs on paper and "stepping through" them by hand. I don't remember what all I did with them, but later I did manage to find that my grandmother had some sort of toy computer where you could input BASIC programs one line at a time, and later a graphing calculator I got in middle school let me write programs in BASIC, although the language was a bit different from the BASIC I found in the textbook.
It was around this time (2004?) that a professor at a local college (the now-defunct Cincinnati Christian University) gave our family two ancient 1983 Macs. They had HyperCard, and I and one of my brothers were hooked. We created "websites" for ourselves, and wrote simple programs to control trains and sound effects and such. I say "websites" in quotes because we didn't have internet access at home, but we worked with what we had.
Since I was obsessed with math at the time, I would write programs related to prime numbers and factoring. A little later we got ourselves a Windows machine, I think a 1993 model, also unable to reach the internet. But it was able to run Visual Basic, which a local high school student gave us on a disk. Among other things, I wrote a program that would find successively closer approximations of pi. Unfortunately, the algorithm, which I found in David Blatner's The Joy of Pi, required exponentially more processor time for each additional digit of accuracy. I don't think I got past a dozen digits.
At about fifteen, I drifted away from programming and got into Greek, Hebrew, and Ancient Near Eastern literature. My interactions with computers narrowed a bit, and were limited to installing and fiddling with an occasional Linux distro and running some websites. This continued through high school, college, and a job troubleshooting a "buffer system" (think conveyors and storage racks for hot aluminum car wheels). After leaving that position and finishing college, I've moved on to running an office for a firm that specializes in fuel branding projects.
In summer 2019, though, my little brother, who used to mess around with HyperCard with me back in the day, suggested that I take up Python 3. I've been picking away at it off and on, and it's been interesting.
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