Gulp - I have been doing this for a while...

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A couple weeks ago I got a mail from jobindex.dk (the first Danish job site) that they were going to delete my profile since it had not been updated for 5 years.

They sent it to my email account - still working! - on my very first domain (plys.net).

I logged in and it turned out it wasn't 5 but 10 years ago I had updated my profile there. Woah. The photo is me in 1996.

Italy 1996 056 f001

Spring of 1997 was around the time I started using MySQL, but I didn't mention that (or even mSQL). I had setup my first Linux system (RedHat 3.0.3 with a 1.2.13 kernel) with Apache (1.1!), Sendmail and BIND/named in the summer of 1996 but other than "internet" and "linux" I didn't mention any of that though. In a list of keyword I had:

"Pascal, internet, unix, linux, wordperfect, macintosh, OS/2"

OS/2 Warp! Did anyone else use that? In Denmark it was quite popular for running BBS and Fidonet nodes.

It's curious I didn't have Perl or Rexx on the list either (I was a shark with Rexx and batch programming with 4OS2 back then. Maybe I thought Pascal was the only serious language to add? I wasn't any good at Perl back then ("or now!" the comments come in, ha-ha) so that'd be a good reason not to include that.

What was your first programming language? How did you get bitten by the Linux bug? I am glad I got started on this in "simpler times", but I suppose it will feel that way no matter when you start.

7 Comments

Ah, several bells are now ringing.

I spent quite some time working with all of the above, but I think my first "real" programming language was COMAL 80, with BASIC/Pascal thrown into the mix as well.

I'm not sure about my first Linux experience, but I have a "Linux Unleashed" from 1995 in the basement...

Man, this is like a trip down memory lane. I used to use OS/2 on my FTN-enabled BBS system, and yeah -- Rexx and 4OS2 batch programming was definitely a part of my historical past. :-)

I'm going to be reminiscing all day now, I can tell... hehe

OS/2 Warp!? I actually got a job because I had that on my resume. It was being used in a satellite setup. I built at NOC around OS/2. It was pretty cool that I could turn my hobby (OS/2) into work.

Oh hell yes, I used OS/2 ( Warp and the version just previous to Warp ) for several years actually. I was fed up with Windows 3.1 and moved and haven't looked back. Finally switched over to FreeBSD and Linux a few years later after OS/2 just wasn't able to cut it.

I was never a Rexx guru, but I did use it for some simple scripting before I too learned the power that is Perl. :)

Hah. That's awesome everyone. :-)

The world of computing would surely have looked quite different if OS/2 had taken off...


- ask

Ah, those memories!

Starting my computing career on a Macintosh SE, my first exposure to programming was HyperCard's HyperTalk, with which I created a small platform game (lost in a hard drive crash).

Reaching it's limitations, I moved on to C and C++.

These days I'm earning my money with PHP, MySQL, fooling around with ObjC all spiced up with a bit of Perl, Ruby and Java.

Well, I started on an IBM PC XT back in 1987, with the XT ROM BASIC and DOS. I didn't use OS/2 at all, but rather DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows 98, and then Linux and other UNIX clones.

I started seriously working with UNIX on my second job as a programmer, in Cortext Web Design, although I had some rudimentary experience with it before hand. That was back in 1996. That's how I also learned Perl.

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This page contains a single entry by Ask Bjørn Hansen published on April 20, 2007 11:12 PM.

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