From: Spike Jones (spike66@attglobal.net)
Date: Sat Jul 07 2001 - 22:35:21 MDT
> > > Spike Jones said: How many of us would ever have bothered
> > > >to learn programming if not to advance our careers? How many of
> > > >those who would have programmed anyway would have gotten as
> > > >good at it as we are had not it advanced our careers? ...
>
> Harvey Newstrom wrote: The entire hacker community developed from a desire to
> grow, learn, explore
> and thrive in the world of cyberspace. This was more of a life choice and a
> hobby, and was usually not connected to career options.
> ...To be honest, it had not previously occurred to me that someone could get
> into computers for the money and not for an innate love for technology.
Actually I think you are right Harvey. I rethought this and remembered
being motivated back in high school to learn programming in order to mess
around with mathematical functions, kind of as a hobby. In that sense
Im still doing that to this day. When our high school was given a number
of semi-functional Apple IIs, we had almost no software, no word
processors, no spreadsheets, but all the machines had good old
Applesoft Basic. We used them to generate large prime numbers,
find arithmetic sequences of primes, do monte carlo solutions to
problems, that kinda stuff.
Ja we had a ball with that, but I didnt entertain the notion at the
time that we could make a living at it. Then when the programmable
calculators came along shortly afterwards, we were constantly
messing around with those too, just to play. Its the boring stuff like
Fortran coding that one makes a living at. Actually Ive had a lot
of fun with that too.
The original poster who was complaining about THE MAN stealing
his life away in a 9 to 5 needs to seriously look around and find a better
9 to 5. spike
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