It all started spring of 1973; I was fourteen, a senior in middleschool and my best friend, Jed, was a freshman in high school. He came home with an extra-wide strip of adding machine tape covered with cryptic codes. He excidedly explained to me line-by-line; "It does this, then this, then this, then all this over and over until this here is equal to zero!" To which I said;
"Oh! I know how to do that. I can do that. I'm going to be a Programmer when I grow up."
That summer I rode the bus down to the University Bookstore and bought myself a college text book on FORTRAN programming (this is the book ), read it cover-to-cover and by the end of summer I knew how to program in FORTRAN.
All through high school I worked on the school's Wang 600 Desktop Programmable Calculator and sent my FORTRAN punchcards downtown via the schools mail system to be run on their IBM 360. My senior year project was a 3-D graphing program on the Wang.
My freshman year at the University of Washington included ENGR 123, FORTRAN, which I aced.
I drifted off my true path until 1982 when the job I was working was winding down and a friend told me 'There is a company around the corner that is hiring Programmer Trainees' and thus I started my professional career as a Programmer, Software Engineer, and Senior Software Engineer.