This is a really cool thread. Really, I had the impression that everyone here was in there 20’s and boy/girl geniuses. I feel less of an outlier.
I read about a study that managers overestimate the salaries of their peers and those managers below them and underestimate the salary of peers above. I think maybe for me a similar mechanism occurred with age. Hmmmm…
I'm 46. My first (and only formal) CS course was conducted using teletypes and a mainframe in Canada, while I was in Phoenix AZ: the McGill University System for Interactive Computing, or MUSIC, which taught us BASIC.
There was a card reader in the building, but I never used it for anything. I did use up a lot of fan-fold paper, though, as this was an actual clatter-type teletype, not one of your fancy "glass terminals".
It was very nice to spend the god-awful summer in a 70° room...
Walter
Just turned 24
I am 3 bytes years old. 
> I'm 54. Provable the eldest one in this mailing list. > Why do you care about age?
I think my 61 beats that. I wrote my first code 42 years ago (Elliott 803, paper tape input, 1kHz cycle time (yes, kHz)). I expect there are older still. I care about age because at some point my validations on age will fail.
Colin
Nope, got that beat. I'll be 66 on Sunday. First code in 1970 in a freshman Fortran class at ASU, but really learned logic as an aircraft mechanic at age 18 in the Air Force. If you had a problem on the aircraft that you didn't know about, you used decision logic tables or problem solution charts to find the symptoms and search for solutions. Just a big nested if else statement.
Steve
Not all of us. It is interesting for sure!
For the record... I'm 36. First computer was a TRS-80 that read games off of cassette tapes (oh how i hated that cassette player!). First real computer was the original 1984 Macintosh which I had till about a year ago when my boys finally managed to kill it off. I like to think my dad got his money's worth out of that old Mac
-philip
Great to see some other programmers on this list of "mature age". I'm 49 and wrote my first line of code in Pascal at the University of Sydney 30 years ago. It has been a fascinating journey since then and these days I love programming in Ruby for a living.
I am 3 bytes years old.
I am 3 bytes years old => 3* 8 bits => 24 years.
I wrote the first program in C 5 years ago at the University of Malawi. Before then, I had never touched a computer (typical of an African child ). I should confess that C remains my favourite language to the extent that sometimes I find myself writing C-like Ruby code :-). I used to love MS tools, but I am “nixed” (= christened into Linux Faith), though I can still dance to MS tunes when they are talking in C language.
I got you beat there. I started drawing my early social security earlier this year. I am 62 and started programming on an IBM 1130 in '67 or so. All of the programing was on cards. Lots of fun carrying a box of them around. That machine had a removable disk drive of some type that contained megabytes of space. It was amazing what you could do with a machine like that. We didn't get to run our own programs, you had to submit them and then figure out what you did wrong from the output listings.
Norm
Colin Law wrote:
We didn’t get to run our own programs, you had to submit them and then figure out what you did wrong from the output listings.
That is an amount of patience that I think has been lost forever
5 track paper tape ... mumble mumble ... hollerith ... grumble grumble ... punch card ... mumble ... marveled at the technology that allowed us to encode *lowercase letters*!!!1!! (or 7 track paper tape as it was known).
Actually I'm only 49 but I started quite young. I've been a paid
programmer for nearly 30 years (probably 28 years but when it gets
this long things get fuzzy ) I think I was 11 or 12 when I wrote my
first program - using paper tape.
You know what the great thing is, it just keeps getting better!
Keep up to date with Rails on Twitter and This Week in Rails
Policies: Conduct, License, Maintenance, Security, Trademarks