I'll admit it: I *love* code. Computers are magic, and since my first taste as a 5 year old, I've been pretty well hooked on them. When I started with them, they weren't like the toaster appliances they are now, and learning to become the wizard beh...
When I was 10 I was introduced to Logo, the programming language, and the turtle robot.
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You'd write programs like "REPEAT 4 [FD 100 LEFT 90]" (which would draw a square), and a dot on your screen, called the turtle, would move around following your commands. It was amazing to draw fractals and complex shapes just by crafting these simple programs. You could also get it to print text on the screen and prompt a user for input. So, my first taste of programming. The turtle robot was a physical robot that you could program with Logo, and it would draw on big sheets of paper you put on the floor. I was hooked right then. Random geek fact: There used to be international Logo competitions for kids to compete in, where you'd spend several hours solving problems by writing Logo and submitting the results to a committee to judge who would pick winners. I'm not saying I was geeky/nerdy enough to compete in any of those competitions, but I'm not necessarily denying it either ;)
BASIC was the natural next step, and it wasn't long before I found myself the proud owner of Kernighan and Richie's The C Programming Language. I didn't have a C compiler yet, so I learned to program in C by writing programs on paper and just imagining them running. I also didn't have access to a modem, so I snail-mailed a few programs to a friend who had access to a compiler and he'd type them in, run them, and mail me back the output, which taught me very quickly to stop making syntax errors before mailing out code. It wasn't too long before my father bought me Borland C. It was a stack of 3.5" floppies that took hours to install, came with half a bookshelf of manuals, and I disappeared into my room for a long time to dig in.
A few years later, as a teen, while browsing a bookstore in DC I found Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography which I bought immediately and read cover to cover a few times. I remember asking my middle-school maths teacher to explain what modulus meant - you might imagine, I wasn't getting full advantage out of the book at that time, although I kept that 1st edition for years and loved rereading it well into my 20s. The book had a magically exciting appendix, which was source code for some cryptographic algorithms, and over many weeks I typed them each into my computer, one by one, trying to understand how they worked, and why, and having fun writing a diary that I'd encrypt with progressively more advanced algorithms as I learned how to make them work.
![You'd write programs like "REPEAT 4 [FD 100 LEFT 90]" (which would draw a square), and a dot on your screen, called the turtle, would move around following your commands](https://img.wattpad.com/81b3289462990c1d4d443b6ecce172481042109a/68747470733a2f2f73332e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f776174747061642d6d656469612d736572766963652f53746f7279496d6167652f626d364153774678704a4f5333773d3d2d3232353233303938382e313433363865356238653565366232652e706e67?s=fit&w=720&h=720)
