My interests in computers date back to the late 1970’s. I took several computer classes in high school, learning Fortran IV, Cobol and Neat/3. (Neat/3 was the assembly language of the NCR computers, NCR is National Cash Register.) I also joined a computer programming Explorer Scout troup where I learned how a computer “thinks“. I took to programming and was hooked for life.
In graduate school, I wrote two major programs; an operating system for data acquisition and an analysis program. The operating system was in Current Pascal and the analysis program was an object oriented program written in Fortran. Granted, I had never heard of object oriented programming in the early 80’s when I wrote the program but that is basically what it was and why it survived many years after I left graduate school.
My career has been that of a software engineer. My work has been wide ranging from scientific software for MIT/Lincoln Labs to data storage systems, to network backup technology, business applications and content delivery networks. It is hard to say if programming is my career or hobby since I love developing programs.