How old are you?

[Shadow-GK]

Hi everyone!

One day I was wondering, how old my fellow programmers from vbforums were? Hmm.. So I decided to create this poll because not many people have their age shown on their profiles, however here it's anonymous so everyone can check off their age and see the final results!

P.S: Yes, I'm 17.

P.S2: It wasn't supposed to be offensive in any way! I just didn't have an option to go beyond 10 choices. And after I posted I realized I couldn't change the poll itself. And hey, if there are a lot of 30+ years old members, that's even better because it means we have a lot of experienced senior developers who deserve respect! C'mon, don't take everything personally!!

[JuggaloBrotha]

I'm old enough to realize that I'm still a stupid kid :P

[Max Peck]

Boy, this is getting disgusting. To find my year of birth I always have to scroll about 2 pages down on combo-boxes! In this poll the top number is still 22 years short! ;-)

-max

[LaVolpe]

Why stop at 30? Is 30 suppose to be old? Posted by a teenager? That explains it. Let me tell you this young'en, 30 may seem old to you now, but in about 40 years, you'll be dreaming of 30 year olds . I guess the word 'old' is relative after all.

[opus]

Why stop at 30? Is 30 suppose to be old? Posted by a teenager? That explains it. Let me tell you this young'en, 30 may seem old to you now, but in about 40 years, you'll be dreaming of 30 year olds . I guess the word 'old' is relative after all.

[akhileshbc]

20 years...

[mendhak]

In my day, we didn't have to ask someone their age. We used to count the rings they were wearing. Sort of like a tree.

[opus]

1 ring (i.e. still fist marriage, I know that's not common around here!)

[dbasnett]

Why stop at 30? Is 30 suppose to be old? Posted by a teenager? That explains it. Let me tell you this young'en, 30 may seem old to you now, but in about 40 years, you'll be dreaming of 30 year olds . I guess the word 'old' is relative after all.

Can I get an Amen!

[GaryMazzone]

You should have a 50+ range in there

[techgnome]

Why stop at 30? Is 30 suppose to be old? Posted by a teenager? That explains it. Let me tell you this young'en, 30 may seem old to you now, but in about 40 years, you'll be dreaming of 30 year olds . I guess the word 'old' is relative after all.

Indeed.

-tg

[opus]

....., you'll be dreaming of 30 year olds......

Just heard that clacking sound when one of those 30 year olds was walking by my office ( walking by... not enter...)

[MarMan]

I guess the word 'old' is relative after all.

When I was 16 I thought 30 was old and thought I would be dead by 40. Now I'm almost 42, 60 seems old and the 60-year old programmer calls me young.

Here's a tip on how to make the years not fly by so fast. Every day think about how old you are to the day. And be glad you are alive. I'm 41 years old and 269 days. Then later on in the day think about the fraction, almost 41 3/4. If you do this then it your years will APPEAR not to fly by so fast. Its like watching the clock at work, it really works!! (I just wish I would've thought about it sooner )

[Shaggy Hiker]

Can I get an Amen!

AMEN! Preach it brother!

Why the bias? Is it just that pop culture has made it appear that only young people work as coders? I'm 43, yet I'm a second generation coder. Better yet, there isn't a single person at my office who is both a programmer and even remembers back to when they were 30.

[MartinLiss]

I'm 69 1/2.

[RobDog888]

w00t! Im 30+

[formlesstree4]

Woot, I'm 17, almost 18!

[GaryMazzone]

w00t! I'm an old c00t almost 55 by these standards (my daughter says I older then dirt)

[JuggaloBrotha]

I'm not even all that old and my 6yr old kid calls me old!

[Doogle]

59 with 1 ring on my finger (actually, it's been there for so long I can't get it off)

(I see the 30+s are well in the lead at the moment)

[Justa Lol]

i turned 17 the 18th november, and i've been programming since i was 9 with java and html but nothing special until i joined vbf.

[dilettante]

JavaScript isn't Java.

[Shaggy Hiker]

He was too young for java. At that age, the caffeine vector is all soda products.

[techgnome]

I can remember when it was called ActiveScript...

developers these days have it easy... I can still remember when the color choices were two - Green or Amber - Dot matrix printers and green-bar paper. Disk-notchers where hot-technology, effectively doubling your storage capacity, and the AT was the fastest thing you could buy. 1Mb RAM was unheard of and if you had that much, you had to use tricks to load anything into the memory that high.

-tg

[MarMan]

Scissors were my disk-notchers. They wanted too much for those things. I even used a hole puncher once. Turned my 140K disks into 280K. Along with my 1 Mhz CPU and 128K memory (64K was standard, I had double, but could only access 64K at a time [bank switched] like tech was saying).

Can anyone guess my first system described above?

[techgnome]

sounds very similar to the Sinclair that I had...no, wait... my Sinclair only had 1k.

Hmmmm... thinking...


-tg

[GaryMazzone]

how about the old Commadore 64

[MarMan]

1K!!! I haven't heard of anything smaller, and before that post the smallest I knew of was 5K.

[MarMan]

Good guess Gary, but incorrect.

[Justa Lol]

JavaScript isn't Java.

if that was for me, i know JavaScript and Java is completely different. and yes i meant Java, not JavaScript.

[baja_yu]

I lost my 'computing virginity' to a Commodore 64.

[techgnome]

For me it was an Apple ][e
Then for the longest time I had an I.B.M. PC... 4.88MHz 320k which we upgraded to 640k, 32MB harddrive and a Hayes 1200b Baud modem. Buddy of mine actually had a 300baud acoustic modem..... dial, dial, dial, dial, dial, dial, dial, wait for tone signal, slam the handset into the receiver cups.... man. Those were the days.

-tg

[MarMan]

That was mine, the IIe with the 6502 and the floppies that were floppy on the outside as well as the inside.

[Doogle]

I still have a Commodore 64 in the attic. First Micro-computer I came upon was the 'Pet' with 8K memory.

Those that supported Floppy Disc came much later, off-line storage was a Cassettte Tape Deck. 6502 Assembler programming and / or a variety of Basic - ah, those were the days.

Somewhere, I've still got a 6502 cross compiler I wrote in IBM 370 Assembler.

[baja_yu]

I still have a Commodore 64 in the attic. First Micro-computer I came upon was the 'Pet' with 8K memory.

I envy you. I gave mine away years ago when I got my first PC, but it's a decision I'm still regretting. Never had a floppy for it, just the cassette deck. But I did have an EEPROM module that loaded Turbo 250 or the program to help you set the cassette head. That made my life much easier, I didn't have to load turbo from a cassette over and over, you just pressed F5 if I remember correctly.

[MarMan]

I'll bet the person you gave the Commodore to was very happy.

[techgnome]

Until a couple years ago, NASA was paying top dollar for old 8086 CPU chips... turns out that's what the onboard computers of the shuttles used.

-tg

[dbasnett]

My first computer is in the link in My Signature. It did not have a disk, all punched card, and I wish I had one in my attic.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I started with a TRS-80 Level I with 4K RAM and a tape drive. To do graphics you had some large grid graph paper on which you drew the image, then toggled the individual pixels. It ran BASIC, but due to memory limitations, it didn't run MUCH.

The first computer I bought was a 286 with a 44MB HD and something like 2MB of RAM. It might have only been 1MB that I later upgraded, but it was hard to make use of 1MB, let alone 2. Many people were using that upper MB as a RAM disk that loaded programs during boot because programs were so slow to load from the HD of the day. I thought I was cooking with gas, though, because of the size of that HD and the fact that I got 256 color VGA! I had never actually SEEN 256 colors on a computer screen before, and had some real doubts as to whether or not it was really possible. I was used to the 4 color CGA graphics that the high end computer at school had (there were two of them, I think, along with dozens of monochrome), though one guy had an EGA card that his monitor barely supported.

[dbasnett]

Me and a friend built a robot out of a BigTrac, ZX80, and Polaroid Ultrasonic Ranging unit. We used my TRS-80 to develop the code and test the hardware. Neither of us were electrically inclined and made the mistake of putting 25VDC on the bus of the TRS-80. It sounded like a popcorn machine... Eventually I got it fixed and the robot ran around the floor avoiding obstacles.