I was born and raised in Nampa, ID. I
first got involved in computers when I was in 9th grade. The first
computer I ever saw was the Commodore Pet. If anyone even remembers this
ancient personal computer than you know that this computer was quite powerful,
in its day. Shortly after this my parents bought a TI-99/4A
computer. This too was powerful in its day but had its quirks about
graphics programming. This is the computer where I taught myself BASIC,
Extended BASIC, and Assembly. This is when I figured out that this is
what I wanted to do as a career.
The first "PC" that I bought was an Epson 8088
XT. Again, I started teaching myself BASIC. I even started learning
about a language called Turbo BASIC put out by Borland. In High School I
took a couple of computer programming classes. Sadly, my programming
knowledge was more advanced than what the teacher was teaching. The
second computer programming class covered PASCAL. I picked this up very
quickly. After school I started learning C. I was able to write a
few DOS C apps. However, I just couldn't grasp the C++ object oriented
programming at that time so I had difficulty learning how to write programs for
Windows.
When I started working at MicronPC (Micron Computer at
the time) I was gaining interest in Microsoft Visual Basic. I got a copy
of VB4-32bit and wrote my first app in the spare time when I worked on the
night shift. The program kept track of an employee's time worked.
It also tracked vacation time and if that employee entered their hourly wage it
would calculate how much their paycheck would be. It was accurate to
within $50. This program (with a few minor modifications) is still used
today by a few people. This also got the attention of a few
managers. I was offered a position to write programs full time. Of
course I took it. Since then I have wrote quite a few programs and
learned about databases like SQL Server. Within the last 6 months I have
started learning about VC++/MFC/ATL. I have wrote several multithreaded
server apps now in MFC.
Who knows what the future has in store for me.
But as long as it is in programming, I can't wait....
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