About Me
By SteveI am a computer programmer with interests in all kinds of programming. Programming has been a passion of mine since I was 11 or 12 years old. My first experience with computers were with 300 baud, acoustic coupler modems (where you had to dial a phone with a handset and then when you heard the beep, you would put it into handset holder) and yellow papered teletypes at my middle school. I remember frenzied typing of B-A-N-G for Oregon Trail and my first attempts at programming.
My first computer at home was a Sinclair ZX-81 that my dad put together from a kit. It was hooked to a small black and white TV and had 1K (1024 bytes – compared to 4GB – 4,294,967,296 bytes for today’s computers) of memory! You could write maybe 40 lines of a BASIC program with 1K of memory. After that a friend of mine got an Apple II (with a cassette drive only). We programmed and gamed on that computer all through high school.
In college I initially decided that I wasn’t going to pursue a computer science degree, because I would rather leave programming as just a hobby. But after bouncing around many degrees (including starting with electrical engineering, dabbling with journalism, and playing with philosophy), I ended up going into what I was trying to avoid. Along the way I picked up a Philosophy minor (2 classes short of a major).
Fast forward twenty three years and I am still programming and having a blast doing it!