I hope you’ll indulge me this week as I take a break from my usual rantings about agentic coding and meander down memory lane.
I learned to code BASIC in the mid-1970s at my progressive junior high school. In math class. We took Fridays to learn about line numbers, loops, statements, and the amazing GOSUB, which was as close as we got to a function call. It strikes me that it was pretty early in the whole tech world to be teaching seventh graders to program, and I feel lucky.
Coding faded into the background for me through high school, but soon afterward the arrival of Windows 3.0 and modems made writing software fun again. You could even earn a little profit. CompuServe, AOL, and bulletin board systems (BBS) created a market for shareware.
I bought a copy of Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.0 from Borland and a copy of Mastering Turbo Pascal 6 by the great Tom Swan, and I learned the Pascal syntax. I remember being delighted to discover that Swan had also written a book specifically for Turbo Pascal for Windows, and I devoured that too.
In search of SYSBACK
