My dad hired me when I was 14 to help with an engineering project that required calculating thousands of structural tolerances. The job was pretty repetitive on

My dad hired me when I was 14 to help with an engineering project that required calculating thousands of structural tolerances. The job was pretty repetitive once I figured out how to run the formulae using a slide-rule. At some point a relative who was also an engineer was moving out of the country and was selling off his extra stuff. Dad bought what turned out to be an HP-65 programmable calculator, thinking it might come handy for something. He never opened the box and it sat in his office for weeks. One day I came across it and started noodling. Pretty soon figured out you could program the calculator to do the main calculations for my job. What was supposed to be an all-Summer project ended up finished in less than two weeks! (I still got paid for the whole work. Thanks Dad!) That was my first taste of how programming machines can save time. A few years later I bought myself an HP-41C with a card-reader attachment and then discovered 'synthetic programming' (one of the earliest versions of 'jailbreaking'). These were all gateway drugs. Have been hooked on programming ever since. Thanks for bringing back all kinds of fond memories.