Was 14 and on a Friday boss gave me some money to go find a book on C. He would take care of the expense form. I read the book over the weekend, and he had me

Was 14 and on a Friday boss gave me some money to go find a book on C. He would take care of the expense form. I read the book over the weekend, and he had me writing code on Monday. (The book had a diamond on the cover and didn't turn out to have the popularity of K&R). He told me to find example code and copy and paste it. I wrote a terminal emulator and a manufacturing quotation database (he provided me with greenleaf libraries). They both ran fast. All that accomplished and I didn't know pointers well enough to be able to teach them. This was in '86. I also had a full collection of Byte Magazine which was motivating. It is so less nerve-wracking writing code today, knowing what to do if there are bugs in the language or libraries.