There used to be magazines that would print, line by line, entire programs in BASIC for pages and pages. I did those as a kid on a C64. That definitely wasn't

There used to be magazines that would print, line by line, entire programs in BASIC for pages and pages. I did those as a kid on a C64. That definitely wasn't programming because I was basically just reading a recipe. I officially took a BASIC class in Jr. High, but shortly after that, x86 took over and I really didn't do much with computers throughout high school. I got a PowerBook 145 for college where I majored in econ. My advisor somehow got me an account on a VAX machine and that's where it all started. I was one of the first at my school to have email. Played around with some MUDs, gopher, ftp archives, etc. I eventually started goofing around with HTML. That was far more interesting than my econ work. I looked at changing majors, but my school's CS dept was severely behind (late 90's by this time. The only thing they were teaching was C and Assembly with no internet technologies. I heard they didn't add Java until the early 2000's. Dropped out because by this time if you could spell programmer, you got a pretty good job as one. I was floating around with frontend stuff, but knew I had to learn backend as quickly as possible. I bought Fast and Easy PHP by Julie Meloni (which I still have!) to help a local animal shelter build a huge database driven site. It was one of the first in the state. That was a game-changing resume item at the time. Now here we are. Go/Python/Node are my primary tools these days. I eventually did finish my econ degree, but my career is software engineering.