My dad was a self-taught programmer (he was a chemical engineer and loved to learn new things). I started by playing games on our Apple IIe (with a tape drive a

My dad was a self-taught programmer (he was a chemical engineer and loved to learn new things). I started by playing games on our Apple IIe (with a tape drive and 114k of RAM!), then typing in games from magazines, then tweaking those games to work the way I wanted. When I was 15 I got a job at a gas station and built a service reminder system for them, based on some software my dad wrote. I had to replace about half of his code, so it probably would have been faster to start from scratch but I didn't have the confidence to do that at that time. I got a little help from my dad, but not much. Most of my friends were geeks (we played D&D at lunch in the math wing of our high school, and most of us were in the band) but only one of them became a programmer as a career.