Where it all began... or, "in my day, we didn't have '1's and '0's... we only had '1's"
Although my career spans over 35 years, I've been programming and writing code for close to 40 years now. That notion wasn't lost on me when the other day I was talking to other "grizzled" engineers about how the more things change, the more they stay the same. In truth though, software development and engineering is just one side of a craft I fell in love with really since I can remember. Hardware and electronics is where I got started. I took apart every thing I could find just to see how it worked. I used to spend hours in my parents basement reading all of my dad's science books. He used to bring home old worn out copies of Popular Mechanics, Popular Electronics, and the like. If it had wires or gears or required some modicum of technical knowledge, I was all over it. The first computer I ever wrote software for was an Apple ][. To a 14 year old, entering commands in in Apple Integer BASIC and displaying color sprites was nothing short of miraculous. Du