My first experience with a computer was in 1964 when on a school trip we went to Canada's Queen's University.
It was one of the few places that had a computer. That day I successfully programmed the IBM to compute the square root
of any positive number using Newton's approximation method. I did not get paid.
I was intrigued enough to enter a math program at the U of Waterloo two years later.
They had a huge (and I mean physically) IBM360, and a reputation for WatFor, their version of a one-pass Fortran compiler.
It was based on hashing, the same principle as used in B4X Maps. It was lightning fast.
In the summers of 1967 and 1968, I got my first paid job at the now defunct Automatic Electric company.
First I programmed the Parts-Explosion (the propagation of price changes of raw materials to the 10,000 parts used in company).
The computer was IBM 1401, with a bank of massive tape drives that worked relentlessly to do the work of a non-existing disk drive.
The program language was Assembler. Programmers were still a rare breed and I got paid well.
The next summer was much more interesting. The company made telephone exchanges, and was starting to convert from
electro-mechanical to electronic (not yet digital). I was asked to implement the Fortran based ECAP, an electric circuit analyzer program.
@Johan Schoeman 's current work on JSpice brought back that memory.
My next job shaped the rest of my career. I worked in a brain science lab computing spectrograms of EEG signals using Fast Fourier Time series analysis.
To make a long story shorter, I am now retired and love to code in B4X.
