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A computer when I was still a kid. I wouldn't be the quant and maths PhD I am today without it, that shit literally shaped my life.
I just kept messing around with it when I was 7 years old. I learned to write
.batfiles and create DOS bootable floppy drives for my games at that age (you needed to play around with Soundblaster drivers and DOS extenders at the time). Then at the same age I quickly discovered BASIC thanks to the fact that MS-DOS used to include QBasic. Then learned some basic assembly using MS-DOS's includedDEBUGtool. Then my father got me floppy disks with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ on them and then I learned that shit again just by fucking around and looking at the examples, all at the age 7~8.I coded like a monkey but I still coded and at a very early age I already knew what people usually learn first in university computer science classes.
By the age of 14 I already knew how to write my own minimal bootloader in assembly and a basic 32-bits kernel in C. (then later on math ironically won me over, so ended up formally pursuing applied math with a tiny bit of computer science because I just didn't need it and the whole exposure to programming at a very young age helped me a lot)
All of that was just thanks to the little spark I got when I first got that Pentium MMX computer.
This is an awesome story. I started early too but all that got me was into some sketchy early aol rooms lol.
yeah curiosity can definitely lead to different places 👀
That's almost exactly how I got started, except instead of Turbo C++ and Turbo Pascal it was whatever free or bootleg programming language I could get my hands on. I remember when I first learned Java I used an online compiler where you just plopped your code in a text box, then I found some compiler called not
javac, butjc. I pointed it at the directory for the Java class library in Netscape and I was off to the races lol