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Early Days of Coding Greats
Stories about the intelligence and foresight of tech royalty are easy to find. Microsoft is worth how much?! Google just launched what?! We all had to start somewhere, so let’s take a look at some early projects of the tech greats.
Mark Zuckerberg
Known for: Co-founding Facebook
Mark wasn’t a computer-obsessed kid. “Learning how to program didn’t start off with wanting to learn all of computer science or trying to master this discipline or anything like that. It started off because I wanted to do this one simple thing — I wanted to make something that was fun for myself and my sisters,” he said. That game would be similar to Risk and centered around the Roman Empire. “You played against Julius Caesar. He was good, and I was never able to win.”
Before AOL Instant Messenger came out, Mark also made “ZuckNet,” a program that allowed instant messaging between all the computers in his house and the computers at his dad’s dentist practice.
Linus Torvalds
Known for: Creating and maintaining Linux
Linus wrote his first lines of code in BASIC on a Commadore VIC-20. He remembers that it was a repeating loop to print a message, but he doesn’t remember what the message was! His sister Sara claims it was “SARA IS THE BEST” printed infinitely, but Linus finds that unlikely.
Grace Hopper
Known for: Building the first compiler
Grace didn’t have computers lying around while she was growing up, so she learned the necessary skills a different way. When she was young, she took apart seven alarm clocks hoping to learn how they worked before her mom found out and limited her access to clocks. Later, she learned a lot about programming by writing a 500-page book, “A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator,” a computer created by Howard Aiken.
One time, she was having technical trouble because a moth flew into her machine, giving birth to the term…
