Here are my early days:

• 1974, started with Prime Basic (anyone remember Prime and Primos?).

• 1976, one week summer course at ICL introducing Computer Education in Schools (CES), the CESIL assembler and #JBAS.

• 1978, another one week summer course, this time at Leeds University. Learned Algol 60 for a DEC-10.

• 1980, RSTS-E and BASIC-PLUS, together with Macro-11 on my school's PDP-11. My brother who was working for Digital, had a MicroPDP that I wrote a fair amount of code for.

• 1982, Summer job before starting Uni. Worked as a FORTRAN programmer on VAX/VMS 2.7. This was my first job, and I'm still friendly with my ex-colleagues there.