How did you get into programming in the first place?

If you want a sanity check on programming life, I recommend you follow @ThePracticalDev in some form.

Recently a question was posed regarding we all got into programming in the first place.
https://dev.to/ben/how-did-you-get-into-programming-in-the-first-place/comments
There are a few interesting posts, here is my submission.

The Vic-20 was the first introduction, using BASIC pokes recorded on tape, but I think it was seeing the use of a variable in a simple Pascal programme over the shoulder of another student in year 9 that sparked something for my career choice. Ada at university, then PL/SQL with Oracle databases.

I often forget those first years, in between playing some form of space invaders, where I could follow a spiral bound manual to write simple BASIC programs, recording them onto a magnetic tape recorder.

Vic-20 "Datasette"

Insert many years of playing with DOS and autoexec.bat; playing Dune, Civilisation, and any number of cold war games & flight simulators, I found myself in a computing class when I was early teens. In maybe our second workshop I noticed the nerd in front of me doing something interesting with a 'variable'. No doubt my memory has warped this moment over time, but I vividly recall contemplating the creative implications of this temporary memory storage.

This nerd & I became friends, we created a cool little character-based word-sleuth game using Pascal, and I think I was kidding myself thinking of a career in Architecture.

It helped that Ada was the language of choice at the time in university. Look familiar? We finished our project work using Oracle, and I found myself at an Oracle client site instead of building internal systems for Collins class submarines...

Now I blog stuff about a revolutionary front end IDE built on top of amazing database technology.

What will we all be programming in three more decades time?