When I was a child, I had difficulty writing. I mean physically writing. My handwriting was terrible, and I went to PT and OT for years. Because of this, I had increased access to that wonderful new device, the personal computer.
At this time, my school did not have computers in the classroom, but it did have a computer lab. My memories from this time are sketchy, but my earliest memories are of systems running DOS and using those systems for three things:
- Playing SIM City
- Using the logo turtle
- Writing essays in Microsoft Works or Word
It appears Logo may have been my first experience with coding, although I never thought of it this way until I saw it listed as a programming language recently.
More importantly to my story is the word processor. I know that seems unlikely for a programming blog, but it leads to my first insight upon reflection.
When we got a computer at home, it was what my dad called a portable computer and looked something like this:
I learned DOS by experimentation, and one of the earliest things I discovered was QBasic. When I first opened it, I saw the user interface and said, "I know how to use this."
The menubar, scrollbars, and editor area had reminded me of the word processor I had spent so much time with. Hence, my first lesson: