A few months ago, I was approached to give a talk at Storylines.  I agreed, and we finally managed to get our schedules lined up so that I could give my talk last night.  I’ve been working on it for a few weeks leading up to it, trying to figure out what I can share that would be useful and meaningful to someone else.

As I was working on it, I was thinking about how I first got into computers in the first place.  When I was a kid, my dad was an enthusiast, and he got a Timex-Sinclair 1000.  He and I learned BASIC on it together, transcribing BASIC programs printed in computer enthusiast magazines into it, and then fixing the inevitable bugs (some typos, some transcription errors, some errors in the code as printed in the magazine).  Later on, he got a Radio Shack Model 100, and we upgraded from transcribing BASIC programs from magazines to transcribing BASIC programs from books.

Thinking back on learning BASIC with my dad, I realized that we were doing pair programming long before it became a thing.  We were way ahead of the curve!