So it wasn't at a professional level, but I had an Apple ][+ when I was 13, taught myself BASIC and 6502 assembler. Yeah, no one had a hard drive at the time, i

So it wasn't at a professional level, but I had an Apple ][+ when I was 13, taught myself BASIC and 6502 assembler. Yeah, no one had a hard drive at the time, if I recall. I got good enough at assembler to be able to hack Sensible Speller to bypass the copy-protection call and be able to copy with a normal disk copy. I also won a couple two-liner "contests", which was to write something interesting within 2 lines of input, which maxed out at 256 characters. One for Beagle Bros. (who were the coolest software company around back then) and one for Nibble magazine. As for source control, I would not be acquainted with that term till a decade later. There was one time that I was writing a program in Apple Pascal (also self-taught) for 17 hours straight--and then the frickin machine FROZE! Hard lesson learned, that I've generally never allowed to happen again. Yeah, that was mid-late 80s and basically knew more that the teachers how things worked on those computers.