Comment by thaumaturgy
1 day ago
Different strokes, I guess. FWIW, I also started at 8 -- with a Commodore 64 and a Commodore Vic-20, both connected to a television -- and I found the process of trail-and-error learning my way through BASIC to be absolutely awesome.
I would start with a completely blank slate and then, gradually, be able to create something out of nothing. If I was clever enough, it could do whatever I wanted (as long as my wants were modest). It was magical and I have nothing but fond memories of the time I spent doing that.
Did you end up writing a word processor? :)
Haha! I did, but not for a few years, until I took up Pascal and MacOS and then wanted to find a way around the 32k text limit that was a stubbornly difficult problem to solve for a while (and was the original reason that BBEdit became so popular).
Trying to correctly render a vertical blinking cursor on top of proportional fonts took me ages to get right...ish.
I learned that I really enjoy working on fine details, hyperspecializing, and doing deep dives into particular systems --- all the things you do to be a competent software security person --- but that end-to-end application construction, front-end to backend to operations --- is necessarily a multiple person project, unless it's like a crazy labor of love that you dedicate all your free time to.