1) When I was 8 I just started reading a GW-Basic programming book, not knowing what programming was at all, just wanted to know more about computers. My dad ha

1) When I was 8 I just started reading a GW-Basic programming book, not knowing what programming was at all, just wanted to know more about computers. My dad had it on the shelf. He then told me we had GW-Basic installed on our 8086 and together we figured that out a bit. From thereon, books from the library (no internet), a floppy disk from a friend with text-files about game programming. Later internet, University and a lot more internet. At University we learned Java, which was my first OO experience (talking 1999 here). 2) As I said, when I was 8 3) 10 years later, on and off (but often in a setting where I had job X and rolled into doing all IT around it up) until I became a scientific programmer 4 years ago (after quitting my Phd in Neuroscience, but that is another story) and started working as a self employed app developer in mHealth last January. ) Edit: PS: I think I outpaced my dad very soon, so most of that was all by meself. I especially remember a 1400+ pages book (in Dutch called 'PC Intern 4') that I borrowed many times from the local library - and given the topic it wasn't really surprising that it was always available: it went into PC hardware programming as detailed as possible, specifying all int 21h calls, explaining how to program the 16 bit Soundblaster and write stuff immediately to the VGA video memory. PPS: I've teached myself programming in GW-Basic, Q-Basic, Asic (which was mainly Basic but had a compiler, WOW!), Assambly, Pascal (inline ASM, WOW!), C (Dos 4GW, WOW!), Java, PHP, JavaScript, Perl, Objective-C. I also did Prolog at the University. And I've done a bit of scripting left and right in Ruby as well.