Scott Hanselman just wrote an excellent post with a photo when he was a child geek.
I cannot resist following him [:)]
This 1985 photo gives a good idea of the little nerdy I was. Second row from the bottom, 4th from the right.
I was ten and I was playing with my first computer, an Exeltel (a french computer)! At that time my main programming activity was to tweak strings and redefine the character set, all this in real-time, to do the games my computer didn’t have, like the so cool Sega Space Harrier. Without the 2×68000 the arcade machine had, I needed a solid imagination to enjoy playing with my own version. The same year, our school got a dozens of Thomson Mo5 and it was fun teaching the teacher how it worked. A few years later, the next step was to code 3D demos for Commodore Amiga. Everything was programmed with 68000 assembly and had the constraint to display 50 frames per seconds.
Everyday my mom was angry telling me computers won’t help going anywhere in
life [:D] Hopefully my friends and parents made me discover also the
pleasure of socialization and outdoor activities.
Since then, my only break in programming was when I did a few years of advanced mathematics classes. I really love maths, especially theory of numbers, but didn’t imagine what to do with it except teaching. I didn’t realize all the potential of being a financial trader. So I chosed to quit maths and go back to software. And since recently, I think my choice of being a programmer instead of being a trader, was not a too bad choice. Especially that for more than 20 years every programming day is playtime [:)].