learning computer programming

In the mid-1980’s or so, when I was around 30, give or take, I chose to take a year of computer programming at a local community college.

It was quite the experience. We learned Basic, COBOL, Assembly Language, Fortran and Pascal, and a lot of it on a TRS-80 (or more fondly called a Trash80) computer.

It was a time when they would have you create a simple program in COBOL that had hundreds of lines of code. I remember the one I did had a bug in it. What that meant is I would need to print out a stream of code via a dot matrix printer which was loud and so freaking slow. Then manually, I had to find that sucker. I found the “:” that should have been a “;”. What fun.

At the end of the year our instructor said this.

Now that you have learned all of this, remember, it, will be obsolete within another year.

I never made the decision to pursue computer programming as a career. But I will tell you, diving into computer programming for a year made me much more comfortable with computers, moving along in life, than most people my age at that time.