Every programmer has a story about how they learned to write their first program. I started learning as a child when my father was working for Digital Equipment Corporation, one of the pioneering companies of the modern computing era. I wrote my first program on a kit computer my dad had assembled in our basement. The computer consisted of nothing more than a bare motherboard connected to a keyboard without a case, and it had a bare cathode ray tube for a monitor. My initial program was a simple number guessing game, which looked something like this