note
Discipulus
Uch! [QM] you stolen my idea for my next meditation! ;=)<P>
I planned to title it: <C>How IT begun? My history with computers and programming</C> anyway here I'm. For sure not an expert.<P>
I think this meditation, if rich of background details, will be useful or fun for future readers. Infact I suspect next generations of programmers will be prepeared in a more formal way and also programming languages will be more industry driven: no more tool made by passionate peoples to help other peoples but more tool made by the industry to make more gold more quicly, as always.<P>
I had a passion for history and I disliked math. Now I understand it was because of wrong teachers.<P>
My father is a professor of an humanistic field. He asked my help when I was a teenager to switch from his Olivetti Lettera 35 writing machine to a PC running DOS 6. I've done my best to help him but I looked at the manual of DOS 6 as you can look at gerogliphic on the Tutankamon pyramid: O_O<P>
On his 286 my father used <C>wordstar 5.5</C> to produce text: everything was block driven with a kind of tag system <i>à la</i> html.<P>
I remember my fear after issuying <C>doublespace.bin</C> reading the evil warning: <C>this command is irreversible</C> ouch!<P>
Then a big time gap till the end of the past millenium. I was in a small group and we collected some old computer and monitors to build up an hack lab. Linux was the new revolutionary thing! iirc redhat 5.6 was the release.<P>
A guy (Daniele if my memory still serves), shall Larry bless him, helped us to build the network (coaxial cables: do you remember?) and gave us the first notions of Linux. At the end of the session he distributed a 20 page Perl introduction in italian (i think is [http://www.aquilante.net/perl/perl.pdf|this one]) saying: If someone is interested and has some spare time this is worth to read..<P>
A friend from Senegal teached me about the art of hardware maintenance, assembling and cannibalizing: still useful lessons!<P>
In a hot summer, after my hours as mason and before fool nights as you can only can afford in your 20s, I tried to write some html page and.. I get bored very soon: ok colors, letters, titles.. it seemed to me a primary school occupation. I needed something more challenging and I took such introduction to Perl.<P>
I reread it many times without understanding well what the goal was: at that time I had no internet support and everything was on my own.<P>
After some hours I produced my first script: an ugly chain of system calls to automate the firewall creation for the above Linux hack lab: the floppy must be still somewhere.<P>
I took a fixed-term job as warehouse worker in a small ISP in my town: I frequently asked for wisdom to Linux gurus there. I was asked to install some windows machine: winnt and the new windows2000. They hired me soon. The luck was at my side<P>
I used perl everytime I had an occasion to do it and I played with perl in my nights: very soon I produced working code to automate stuff on windows.<P>
Joined perlmonks on 2002 to get support: I found the link on my copy of <C>Perl Language Reference</C> italian edition (my english was not so good at this time: studied on my own as perl).<P>
I had some problem because no one of my bosses loved so much perl (only the owner of the company) as you can see in my [id://398815].<P>
So I started because with perl you have immediatly something working, I continued because it can glue everything, I'm still here because the challenge never ends. Infact after circa 2007 I put a big effort on my perl because was the only fun thing of my job: see [id://975931] and over the time it become a passion very deeply nested in me: [id://1192659]<P>
Worth to mention, even if you all already know, a wonderfull communty here at perlmonks: it is still now in 2018 my only net-place and I got a lot of support and some friends too.<P>
<P>
<c>
</c><P>
L*<P>
<div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-174111">
There are no rules, there are no thumbs..<BR>
Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.
</div></div><!-- Wiki2Monks {"version":1.142} -->
1217349
1217349