List the age and language you started programming with. If possible list the machine you first programmed on.
I started programming when I was 10 years old with JavaScript. I programmed on a Windows 7 PC.
Last year at age 33 on a MacBook air at a JavaScript app development bootcamp, so I am a little bit late to the game I suppose, but hey better late than never.
When I was 5 years old my father had bought an IBM 'green screen' computer, and when I see that thing, I just said "I'll work with it" haha.
So when I was 19 years old (I know, it's late) I'm started a technical course (that teach a general vision in programming, networks, hardware, etc...) and in this course I started to programming with c# (Windows Forms), and I really loved it.
In this moment, I realized that I really wanted to work with development, so, with a Samsung i5 laptop running Windows 8.1 (I know, it's sad) and Ubuntu 14.04 I've started.
I'm at the beginning process of learning coding and am 39..started a bit late. I was always intrigued by the weather and the chaotic data that needs to be in order so you can have a descent prediction. Am learning C# and the most technologies from Microsoft but the one am doing better is SQL which i love it.
I started writing my first homepage in plain HTML in late 1995 at age 10 on a Windows 95 PC using Notepad. I fiddled with JavaScript when it landed in Netscape Navigator (so mostly playing with the status bar and mouseover image swaps) and taught myself PHP around 2000 (so around age 15).
However I frequently went months and years without doing any programming until age 20-ish and only really started doing it professionally at age 25.
Well you are pretty young than :) I was 12, started on a commodore 64 with casette driver and 5" diskettes coding with BASIC.
It was BASIC, on Apple Classic (system 7.x) at around 10 years old. :)
On serious note I started programming at the age of 19, C was introduced to us as a first programming language and that really didn't go well. Instead of solving problems we end up memorising the syntax of C. But on serious note I loved Android Programming with Java but due to lack of motivation I started disliking it. Now I am with JavaScript and Python both are scripting language and can do most of the tasks. I had a Lenovo Y500 3000 that time when I started programming which was running Windows and Ubuntu.
Got my first computer at age 14 (have never really used a computer before then, maybe at age 13 when we had our first computer classes at school and we had 3-5 people sharing a single computer in class running DOS). My mom sold her car in order to buy this computer for me and my brother. It was a Pentium MMX, 166MHz, 16MB RAM, 1MB video chip, 700MB Hard Drive and running Windows 95. i later overclocked it to 200MHz (it still had jumpers on the motherboard) and as i found more ram for it, maxed it out to 64MB RAM over 3 years and upgraded the video chip to 2MB. It had a Floppy Drive and a CD ROM and a 14" CRT Screen. That computer i used for the next 5 years (i still have that computer somewhere and it still works)
At age 15, i started programming with Pascal. A friend gave me a copy of Delphi as present and i started coding in Delphi about 6 months later. Large applications took 30min+ to compile / run and the IDE was struggling on that hardware, so had to write near-perfect code, otherwise it would mean wait 30 minutes, get an error, fix that error and restart the compiler process again. Sharing those applications meant zip-ing/rar-ing/arj-ing it and spanning those compiled EXE files over 7 floppies and hoping all the floppies survive when you travel from your home to your friend's home. Since internet wasn't really a thing yet, you took anything that you could find that would help you learn, so i learned quite a bit by working through VB and C code examples i got from the same friend and then wrote that in Delphi.
We are very spoiled these days with powerful machines, IDEs, internet, StackOverflow, online courses, open source, frameworks, etc. When i started, you had to build almost everything yourself, even sorting a list meant writing your own bubble sort or quick sort implementation.
Depends what you count I suppose. I was creating bat files and generally messing with my PC pretty soon after I got it, I think I was about 15. I had an Amiga 600 before that but at the time was mostly focused on writing and gaming.
The first code I tend to count was learning HTML when I was 17. I was probably using Windows 3.11 or 95 on a 486. I learned CSS and PHP a couple of years later; noting CSS was very much the big new thing at the time :) I didn't really embrace Javascript until years later.
Dating myself by answering this. :-)
The first computer that I programmed on was an Atari 800XL when I was a teen. I learned BASIC on it and wrote the first program I got paid for at age 16. It was a star field simulation that was used as a background for a cable television program credits screen (something like below).

Programming was lots of fun but very challenging back then (minimal memory). Very different from today. :-)
BASIC. 11 years old on a Commodore Pet 2001 with 16k of memory and two 5.25" floppy drives. I started using 1 and 2 letter variable names to conserve memory for long programs. My first manager had to beat the habit out of me. Metaphorically, of course.
18 and Machine Code and Assembler on the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). PDP-10 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10
A very big and very expensive Mainframe
I started "programming" probably when I was 8, my school had a terrapin logo class offered at the school. Then I moved to PASCAL when I was 12.
I stared coding at 18 OS: Windows XP Processor : Intel pentium 2 RAM : 128MB First programming language was C.
I learned code at college and the first programming language that I learned was C. But I did not like that language. It had so many difficult parts to understand as a beginner. Then I was introduced to HTML and CSS and JavaScript and I loved it. I was around 18 when I started coding and I had used my college computer. I didn't have a personal laptop till I graduated. Those times were hard learning in the college computer. I used to upload code to Google drive by copying my code to Google docs. Even though I used to code I didn't understand it very well. Only 2 years ago I really came to understand what JavaScript is really capable of.
love this question! it's both fascinating and depressing (depressing because it makes me feel old :)
I was a wee young lass in the early to mid 80s, when I was first introduced to computers. My mom brought home a Commodore64, not really knowing what to do with it, and I remember messing with that for hours, not only playing the games, but writing little programs as well. My dad brought home an Apple IIe from work not long after, and I was introduced to AppleBasic and Logo (remember that turtle?) where I really started to understand what programming was and what it could do. In middle school, we got a Packard Bell 386sx with 1MB of RAM and a 50MB hard drive :) I taught myself DOS 3.3 and was making batch files left and right, emulating my friends 486sx Win 3.1 functionality. High school I taught myself basic, pascal, c, and c++ on an old VAX system and college got me into web programming :)
It was either a TI-99/4a using TI BASIC OR an Apple II using Apple BASIC, somewhere around 1979 to 1982 time-frame. Not too long after I tinkered with an Atari 800 using TurboBASIC. I had largely stopped messing with it by High School, though, and didn't start again until my mid/late 20's.
I've started programming when I was ~ 18 years old and my first applications was coded with Pascal programming language for DOS operating system which was powered by Intel 80486 computer. One of my first program's goal was to print on screen atmosphere pressure at a given altitude. Seems that I was interested in calculating formulas very much. Later on when I've started a physics bachelor studies at an university, I've expanded my experience in this area by making a bunch of physics experiment simulation programs. For example- one of these programs have simulated a light refraction laws in a lens given various optical parameters - lens type (biconvex, biconcave,...), distance to focal point, etc.
I started interacting with a computer when there were floppy disks. But didn't know anything too technical about it. Those were Windows 98 from my dad's office, I was at 3rd grade at this time. Those machines broke down and we didn't get them repaired and it took me years to get back with computers.
During my 9th grade, we were taught C in school. But the very way it was taught made me not realize what programming is, how computers operate, they just went on teaching 🤦♂️. Then during my 11th and 12th, I took Computer science as my optional subject as I was a bit more into Mechatronics/technical stuff than into biology/any other subjects. Here my exposure to the new things going on outside and some interest from my lecturer clearing out all kinds of doubts took me a lot into programming. I started 3D animations along with learning practical programming and tried 3D animations for about 6 months, couldn't continue. Rendering headaches? 😂🤦♂️.
It was at this time I put my full focus on programming on the same machine. Windows 7 running on Pentium 4, 2gb ram, 250gb HDD (now you can imagine me doing 3D animations on this machine). That kinda pushed me harder into programming. Although I was introduced to C, C++, Python it was PHP that helped me gain some deep insights and started freelancing/building things in PHP.
So yeah, I guess at age 17-18 I started coding on the same above mentioned machine. Got distracted with electronics, then back again with programming after that.
Oh, I started quite late with 18. After graduating from art school ;-)
I started programming in Java on a crapy old computer. I found it in the cellar. No USB, only floppy disk. And no, it was not the time that floppy disks were still state of the art.
When I wrote the first java program (a hello world), it took (and I am not kidding) 30 minutes on that computer to compile. So, I knew I had to put all my savings into a new machine. That was then a laptop from a discounter (Yeah, I was new to the whole thing, and it seemed like a reasonable idea, back then).
Jan Vladimir Mostert
Idea Incubator
Jan Vladimir Mostert
Idea Incubator
Disha T
Web Developer
Hi I graduated as an electronics engineer sand now I work as Web Developer. I think the best way to learn is through working on simple projects.
I also have my own YouTube channel where I create simple projects to learn more into programming. Check it out here - youtube.com/channel/UCtHEWTpi4_DCKzhOgeYUwug
I have also shared my story here - hashnode.com/post/my-journey-from-electroni..
Thank you :) Disha