> -----Original Message----- > From: G Money [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2008 8:15 AM > To: CF-Community > Subject: Why did you get into computers? (was: churvii: a study in > brainiacs) > > I spun this off into a new thread because it got me thinking........why > did > everyone here get into programming? Was it by choice? Did it just > happen > that way? Did you major in CS in college? Was it to make money?
I got a Ti99/4A when I was a kid... hooked up to a honking big ol' color TV. Played with that thing long after it was dead and gone. When I followed my wife to Boston (she was starting her Masters, I was a high-school graduate working at 7-Eleven) we got a spanky-new 486DX/33 and I started playing. One of the regulars at 7-Eleven was setting up a public Internet Access facility (this was '93) and I volunteered. When "the Web" looked like it might start to overtake Gopher I dug in and learned enough HTML to do a site for the facility. The Wayback Machine actually has a copy of it from '97. This wasn't "my" site by then (I didn't choose the "Gold" background) but most of the graphics and much of the writing is mine: http://web.archive.org/web/19970523155626/http://www.vw.org/ I extended that with a personal site about Boston and grew it up over a year or two. WayBack Machine has a bunch of stuff from that site: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.vboston.com I got an email one day thanking me for linking to another local site. We chatted and it turned out that I had linked to the personal site of the manager of a new media group inside a large Insurance company. She offered me a job. (At the time I was pumping gas for $7.25 an hour... she offered me $25 an hour to start... not a hard decision). I actually started out there doing Macromind (later Macromedia) Director work: presentations and such for bigwigs and trade shows. As the web grew we moved more and in that direction. Eventually we adopted ColdFusion and JavaScript as they were developed and I became a "programmer". ;^) We focused on usability and accessibility testing and marketed our services to outside groups. I've been there (well... "there" has changed drastically due to mergers) ever since - 12 years in September. I'm now doing, through some nasty twist of fate, almost exclusively Unix Shell Scripting against mainframe and DB2 batch processes. I'm about as far from where I want to be as I can be. ;^) Jim Davis ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;192386516;25150098;k Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/message.cfm/messageid:259491 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
