My father is a retired mechanical engineer. Back in the early 1980s he was working on some engine designs and found that the programmable calculators he was using just weren't up to the task of grinding out the mechanical advantage curves he was attempting to characterize. So first he got a Tandy Pocket Computer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_Pocket_Computer) and later a full-fat TRS-80 (the Model 16, the most expensive and powerful model they sold at the time, and part of the Model II line which was incompatible with the TRS-80s most people are familiar with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_II), took a couple of college courses on programming, and wrote an engine simulator in BASIC replete with a graphical display that animated the position of the piston and crankshaft and plotted the curve on-screen.
I mean, the man is a stone-cold genius. Anything he needed to know how to do, he would bro down and learn it, often in a very short time. Even though I didn't understand half of what he was trying to do back then, it was a wonder to young me, especially since it came about by merely feeding instructions into the machine.
Eventually, for my fifth birthday, he went down to Crazy Eddie's and got me a Commodore VIC-20, so I would keep my grubby mitts off his expensive professional equipment. I then began writing my own BASIC programs, to make the PETSCII birds from the tutorial manual fly according to my own plan and so forth. The love of computing had been planted. And here I am. That five-year-old kid, awestruck by having an electronic genie I can type my wishes to and see them granted, is still in there somewhere. The grind of Scrum, meetings, deadlines, legacy code, and the looming spectre of "vibe coding" turning my work and passion into a triviality haven't snuffed the flame yet.
I mean, the man is a stone-cold genius. Anything he needed to know how to do, he would bro down and learn it, often in a very short time. Even though I didn't understand half of what he was trying to do back then, it was a wonder to young me, especially since it came about by merely feeding instructions into the machine.
Eventually, for my fifth birthday, he went down to Crazy Eddie's and got me a Commodore VIC-20, so I would keep my grubby mitts off his expensive professional equipment. I then began writing my own BASIC programs, to make the PETSCII birds from the tutorial manual fly according to my own plan and so forth. The love of computing had been planted. And here I am. That five-year-old kid, awestruck by having an electronic genie I can type my wishes to and see them granted, is still in there somewhere. The grind of Scrum, meetings, deadlines, legacy code, and the looming spectre of "vibe coding" turning my work and passion into a triviality haven't snuffed the flame yet.