It has been an awesome and humbling experience to witness the last 40 years of computing. I wrote my first programs in Fortran on punched cards. Trying to live a healthy lifestyle so that I can witness the next 40 years.
My first computer program was taking an entire "choose your own adventure" type book and implementing it in Basic on my Commodore Vic-20. Took up all but about eleven bytes of RAM that I could cram into the thing, including the 16KB RAM module plugged into the back. That was the summer of 1982, two years before I graduated high school.
I didn't start writing COBOL and FORTRAN programs on punched cards for the IBM 3081 mainframe until I got into college, in the fall of 1984.
Most of what I learned about computing in those early days came from Byte Magazine.
I still want to know when we are going to get our Transputers that can run machine language code from any architecture of CPU, because even their microcode can be rewritten in software on the fly -- beyond what we can do with FPGAs.
