When Did you Learnt to Program?

Today my workmates were talking about Fortran and Cobol in the coffee break. Yeah, I know it’s scary.

I wasn’t really on the conversation, but I said something like I learnt Cobol 85 when I was 14, and I don’t keep a good memory about it, although it had some advanced stuff then.

That ended the conversation with all of them staring at me: When did you learnt to program?. My answer was: I was 13, and learnt almost all I know from an Olivetti Gwbasic interpreter (more or less heh).

Seems that my answer was surprising, and the younger of my workmates asked: Why?. I remember it like one of the most important times of my life: Because of a silly program to change the screen color pressing space that my cousin wrote on a ZX Spectrum. I saw potential.

And the funny part it’s that I’m not alone. One of my workmates confessed he was there with us because of the same home computer from the 80s.

Photo by Bill Bertram, Cc-by-2.5 Attribution.