What lead you to the world of Computer science (or programming)

[immutable]

I first started going into Computer Science in 2001 after learning Perl5 and riding the internet wave through the 90's as a youngster. My interest started with the show "Hackers". Yeah, that's what I wanted to be, now not so much. When I first went it was more programming language oriented with focus on languages such as PASCAL and FORTRAN and COBOL. I decided to finish my degree 5 years later at the University of Oklahoma where it was more mathematical based as compared to that of the Fort Hays State University curriculum. Languages seem secondary and implied that you know them as they stress the logical and mathematical portions of them to which allows me to be a lot more diverse in my applications.

One of my favorite professors was actually from the Oklahoma City Community College ("Haining Chen") and he really refined my love for C++. Of course he was trying to coax me into MAC programming to which I was really resistant.

[S6k9GNh0]

When I was around 8, my parents had dial-up and a Pentium II (something like 800 Mhz clock rate) with 32 MB RAM. Even during that time, the computer was slow. The new flash technology couldn't run on my computer. Basically, my learning experience consisted of searching around the settings of Windows 98. I wanted to know how the stuff worked but I couldn't find the answers. When I had questions, I was oblivious as to where to find answers and when I asked, I was either not taken serious or ignored. The question of what a motherboard was one that bugged me for nearly a year. I didn't understand the terminology to even know what to search for at that point.

When I turned 12, I got my own computer. At that time, my bro introduced Unreal Tournament 2004 to me which was brand spanking new at the time. I ended up joining a community called Roseanne's Bum. I found a good friend there who attempted to teach some Java and UnrealScript to me, but failed due to part of my ignorance at the time. After about half a year of dealing with that, I eventually had a "programmers mindset" (if you know what I mean, that dividing difference) and from there, I started learning just about everything I could. A problem with UT2004 at the time was a lack of a native anti-cheat measures. In order to do so, you can produce some homemade headers of the engine DLL's and use those to interact natively with the game with both the server and client. This was kinda complex for a beginner but I stuck through and made a basic attempt. In the end, it was just rather overwhelming and I ended becoming one of those guys who starts something and never finishes it. >.>

That's about it.