1) Self taught from books, some urging from my mother but not a lot of real help. Occasionally she'd show me tricks. I remember seeing my first loop from her wh

1) Self taught from books, some urging from my mother but not a lot of real help. Occasionally she'd show me tricks. I remember seeing my first loop from her when I was trying to make a line of text scroll across a screen. 2) Five or six. My mother owned a ZX spectrum - this would be around '93 '94 - and she had a bunch of old magazines that had programs in them, so I started typing them in. I'd also done some programming on a BBC before this - but that was with my mother's urging so not really a self-taught thing. 3) I was 16 when I sold my first program to a shop I did some volunteer work at. It was a simple thing that just did ranked correlation coefficients to arbitrary sets of data so that they could keep track of what their KPIs were telling them. More substantially, I did it after uni. Graduated with a philosophy degree, which was the subject I found least objectionable, and found myself largely unemployable in any other line of work.