45 year old guy,
My programming experience date from 1985 when I was at school studying electronics. My interest in assembly language came long before any higher level language was available for me excepts basic on my Tandy PC2 and later my commodore C=64. My first program wasn't a hello world program. In those years we were teached by a math professor and he dislikes the fact that a computer was used for non-math work. So my first program was: A = ? ?.
At the end of my studies I was assumed to make a final work around robotics. The goal: control a robot arm with a computer.
That was it. There I really learned what assembly language was and still is. The final work was a succes ofcourse with aid of a collegue student a the mentor himself (poor guy didn't even know the language of the C=64 and decided not to interfere with the programming part of the work).
Eleven years in the army I studied assembly language on x86 processors, on an old XT with just the debug program shipped with MSDOS. I succeeded ... indeed to crash the computer more often than once and decided to buy a assembler. Easier said than done because MASM wasn't available on this part of the world, internet wasn't available due to security restrictions in the army and after a year I found TASM in a shop. Lucky me.
That together with my obsession for digital electronics I continued programming... until now.