How I started programming

My first exposure to programming was a few programming courses (on cards) at the University of Tennessee. I enjoyed them , but soon left school to go and work for my father in Florida at his jeans factory. I thought, well I had dreams of grandeur, lol. He started me at the bottom and I ended up "turning jeans" for about 6 months. In retrospect I would rather shovel raw sewage then do that job again. At any rate we were raided by the FBI for making counterfeit Calvin Kline's, poof , end of stupid dream.

I quickly got a job as a waiter and enrolled in one of those "be a computer programmer" in six months trade schools. It was surpizingly expensive, but probably one of the best investments I ever made. I did well and was hired 4 months into my term by a local software developer. He actually hired 12 of us. At the time we didn't know he only intended to keep 2. Needlessly to say I was one of the 2. The app was a retail management system that ran on a now ancient mini-computer I' sure few of you have heard of, known as a Qantel (if you look carefully, the termials used by the goverment guys in ET, were Qantels). The language was an odd FORTRAN/Basic hybrid know as '*QicBasic'. The language was actually pretty sophisticated for the time in the way it handled strings and it's formatted I/O. The hardware was pretty innovative as well. It used a bit slice processor with a very flexible instruction set, but I didn't learn about that until much later. Anyway I fell in love with computers and they have been my hobby ever since.

I later joined a company that completely emulated the Qantel OS on a PC, but that's another post.