Turbo Pascal is probably the key thing that led me to end up studying CS and becoming a software engineer. I had dabbled in Basic starting around 10, I took a

Turbo Pascal is probably the key thing that led me to end up studying CS and becoming a software engineer. I had dabbled in Basic starting around 10, I took a summer camp coding class, which would have been pretty novel in the late 80s I guess. But then at some point we got a copy of Turbo Pascal (my Dad was an engineer and was always bringing interesting stuff home for me to try) and I started banging on that. In my senior year of HS I got super into it when I took another class. I did the whole year's curriculum in a couple months and then wrote an asteroids clone in class. It kind of drove the teacher nuts cause he said he had nothing left to teach me and he got annoyed when I started sharing the program with other students and they were playing the game instead of working. The one thing I remember not grokking when using TP was pointers. I wrote my whole asteroids program with fixed size arrays. I don't think it helped that I didn't really have anything great in terms of books and no one around me really understood how to use them well to talk to me about it. A year later when I started learning C/C++ in college I got it quick though. I didn't even switch to CS till after I decided where to attend, I had originally planned on studying Aeronautical Engineering and the whole Turbo Pascal adventure made me change my mind. I keep wondering if I have a copy of that program sitting on a floppy disk and I could recover it. I don't actually own a computer with a floppy drive though, even though I might have an old internal floppy drive sitting in a box.