Comment by juancn

I first learned a Logo dialect in Spanish that we used at school (“HAL Logo en Español”, do not confuse with HAL Laboratories). We had a Commodore-128 laboratory at school (about eight machines with disk drives and monitors). I started learning Logo when I was 8, by the time I was twelve I could program a bit of BASIC also, but not much since literature was scarce.

When I was 12 convinced my dad to get me Commodore 64 instead of a graduation trip (graduation trips are customary in Argentina when you finish primary and secondary school). We bought a used one for U$S 200.

This was 1989 and the social and economic landscape in Argentina was a mess. That year the inflation rate was over 3000% (it is not a typo) and those 200 dollars were a lot of money.

After we got it, my parents were concerned that I might get too obsessed with the computer, so they placed some additional constraints on when I could use it (the fact that we had only one TV might have also been a factor in his decision). I was allowed to use it only on Saturday mornings before noon.

Note that I just got the computer, I didn't have any storage medium.

One great thing about the Commodore 64 was that it came with BASIC, but most importantly, it came with a manual! The Commodore’s Basic manual was my first programming book.

What happened was that I was forced to work as if I had punched cards. I would spend most of my spare time during the week writing programs in a notebook I had. Thinking about ways to solve problems and reading and re-reading the C64 manual.

On Saturday mornings I would wake up at 6 am and hook-up the computer to the TV and start typing whatever program I was working on that week. Run it and debug it, improve it and around noon my mom would start reminding me that time was up. So at that point I began listing the BASIC source code and copying it back to my notebook.

Over the next few years I learned a lot, I re-discovered bubble-sort on my own (I learned the name much later), built hardware gizmos connected to the user port and I even made a very simple multi-tasking interpreter (I eventually got a datasette).

After high-school I studied Software Engineering (not exactly, but the name in Spanish doesn't translate well) and then I really learned to program (heck, I'm still learning).