User talk:Star651: Difference between revisions

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I'm 27. I fell in love for the first time in 1990, when I was seven years old, with an Apple ][e in my classroom. I forgot to place the boot floppy in the drive and was presented with a
<lang text>] </lang> prompt. The school library had three programming books, one on [[BASIC]], one on [[COBOL]] and one on [[Pascal]]. Through trial and error, I discovered that the BASIC book worked with the machine, while the other two didn't. The BASIC book included a listing of commands, but didn't discuss syntax. I had to figure that out on my own. Within a year (I only had about a half hour a day on the machine), I'd written a program that drew multicolored boxes on the screen.
 
I eventually convinced my mother to spend our savings on a computer at home, which was how we got our first computer, a Tandy RLX 1000--an 80268-powered machine with 1MB of RAM. I played around with BASICA, GW-BASIC and, eventually, QBASIC. My mother saw me coding, and I showed her how to do what I could do. Pretty soon, she passed my skill level. Later, she tutored, worked professionally, and then taught programming and database design at the local community college. Now she's in the management of their IT department.
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Also while in college, I started this site. Mostly, I've found that the other people active here individually know a lot more than I do about a wide range of subjects. Collectively, they represent a massive pool of interests. (Incidentally, their presence on the site are why neither you nor I can reasonably win a boasting match on technical-coolness grounds)
 
A year ago, I became engaged to an awesome Linux geek. --~~~~[[User:Short Circuit|Michael Mol]] 12:46, 26 July 2011 (UTC)