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Who or what piqued your interest in technology?
| 7% | 11 votes |
| 15% | 24 votes |
| 2% | 4 votes |
| 4% | 7 votes |
| 4% | 7 votes |
| 50% | 78 votes |
| 5% | 8 votes |
| 9% | 15 votes |
[ Voting Booth | Other Polls | Back Home ]
- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
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Who or what piqued your interest in technology?
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Courage is your greatest present need.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 11, @03:13PM (4 children)
My father was a programmer before me. His father was an engineer. His father I think was also technically minded, although more of a businessman than engineer. Even my last name suggests that my family has been full of tinkerers and technically minded people for centuries.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday February 12, @02:16AM
The interest sort of have to come from the parents. My father for my interest in building and tinkering with things. My mother for mathematics and research. I guess I should thank one of my uncles to since he got my father the computers and various kits to build. Before I took over the role of deciding what to get.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ese002 on Wednesday February 12, @02:49AM (2 children)
I'm just the opposite. i come from a family of low techs. I am the only engineer or programmer in my entire extended family. The closest are an uncle who is a chemist and my sister who stumbled into change management for IT projects.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday February 12, @03:02AM (1 child)
So what first got you interested in whatever branch of engineering and programming you are in? It doesn't seem to have been a family influence.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday February 12, @03:04AM
OK, I've just read your other comment below....
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DECbot on Tuesday February 11, @08:27PM
Wanting to save money on gaming PCs led me to building my own computer. Wanting to host my own web comic led me to server administration. Those two things were the start of it all.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ese002 on Wednesday February 12, @01:45AM (1 child)
I was seven when the Apollo Soyuz rendezvous was broadcast. I was too young to experience the moon landings but I had just begun to dig into science and science fiction. This was my first exposure to real space technology. I eagerly watched the two lights get closer and closer together until they stopped. My reaction was: "This is it? Real technology sucks. Someone needs to fix this. Maybe me"
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday February 18, @10:06PM
My dad got me into computers and taught me how to use a hammer, saw, screwdriver, soldering iron and so on. I too was frustrated at the pace of progress and thought "I could do better than that..." Then this thing called life came along.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday February 12, @02:45AM (1 child)
Curiosity is Spirit's hunger.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by deimios on Wednesday February 12, @12:12PM
My grandpa was fixing TVs and radios back in my childhood. Back then we were "benefitting" from communism so we had access to only ancient knockoffs of western tech. Color TVs just started appearing. Which was pretty useless since we got like 2 hours of TV broadcast daily, half of which was propaganda with the Dear Leader.
Radios were all the rage since you could catch European broadcasts from western countries. (that was illegal of course)
The daily blackouts and brownouts ensured that he always had stuff to fix, even though back then the tech was more resilient to power failures.
He also made TV antennas with which you could sometimes catch signals from the neighboring countries. (that was also illegal of course)
So I guess I started there.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday February 12, @06:50PM
Before I was age 3, I observed that all these cool things in the house got their mysterious powers by being plugged into these outlets. All the outlets were the same. So were the plugs that went into them. There obviously was some kind of standardization here. You could buy a new device, like a kitchen mixer, or toaster, or space heater, floor lamp, radio, etc and it plugged in to the same outlet. So the stores, like Sears, obviously knew about the outlets in OUR house.
To stop me from sticking things into the outlets, my dad put an outlet on a small piece of wood. That was the only outlet I was allowed to play with.
Later it was Lost In Space. All these cool machines. Machines that could instantly do the laundry with each article of clothing coming out folded and shrink wrapped. The robot. The force field. Laser pistols. Computers. And there was the Bat Computer. It somehow knew how to find the criminals and express this information as a puzzle or riddle that had to be solved. Yet in the episode when Batman and Robin go to London and take their equipment with them, it is never explained if the Bat Computer can run on 240 volts in the UK.
But what exactly was a computer? Lost In Space had lots of loose talk about "programming", being "programmed" and computers being limited to their programming, etc. But what this programming was, and how it was done was never explained. If this "programming" was done by voice, then how would a machine understand it? I asked adults way too many annoying questions.
Then there were other deep significant questions. Why did all these discarded radios I could find in people's trash all have exactly five vacuum tubes? The tubes weren't always the same. Yet always five.
Then came the Altair 8800 plastered on the front cover of Popular Electronics. Not that I could ever have access to one. But as I read more and more about its potential applications, I kept asking how could it do so many different things? Without being rewired? In what way is it so smart? It's just a pile of ICs, transistors and circuit boards.
Then a man in my church got an HP 25 programmable calculator. Exposure to this and learning to program it was a religious experience! The Ah Ha! moment. Now it made sense that the Altair 8800 is programmed in "steps" like the calculator is.
By about 1977 I had access to the early microcomputers. A TRS 80 Level II 16K. And at high school a Wang 2200 8K. But its BASIC in ROM was 42K!
People who can't distinguish between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I cannot put into words.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13, @02:06AM (1 child)
I've always loved data and wondering how things worked. I don't have any strong origin myths for where that came from.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday February 26, @03:28PM
I was an adult when Commander Data first appeared. I already was out of college and working with computers and learning new languages.
I saw some reruns of Space 1999. When I saw Barbara Bain's "acting", I then understood where they got the idea for Cmdr. Data.
People who can't distinguish between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I cannot put into words.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13, @10:21AM
Always had a “tech” interest as demonstrated by my parents woes of my one-way mechanical skills… I’d take stuff apart to see the what and the how, yet had not developed comparable skills in reassembling it to working order.
But it was the “Bits and Bytes” [wikipedia.org] TV show, specifically episode 3 “How Computer Programs Work” that instantly got me hooked on computers & programming and the rabbit-hole of tech that opens up with it. Just like you remember where you were when $BIGNEWS happened, watching that episode was that for me.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Covalent on Thursday February 13, @03:19PM
I was already a space nerd from a very young age, devouring books and TV shows and documentaries having anything to do with space.
Then, when I was 9, I watched Challenger explode on live television with my 3rd grade class.
I was young enough that I didn't realize something was wrong. I had never watched a shuttle launch before, so I didn't know what it was supposed to look like. I only knew something was wrong when my teacher started crying and left the room. It was only later that I would learn that she had applied to be the teacher in space and had made it reasonably far in the process.
Nearly 40 years later, I still think about that day. I think about how important it is to be extra cautious with technology that interacts with systems that humans need to stay alive. We went too far too fast with Challenger, and 7 innocent people lost their lives. We should take care to never do that again.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fliptop on Friday February 14, @09:45AM
I voted gadget b/c, although building stuff w/ the set was fun, I wanted to know how the little electric motor turned a battery into motion. So instead of building stuff I started taking it apart to see how it worked. Dad noticed and got me this [pinimg.com] and after that it was off to the races. So I suppose a gadget aroused my curiosity and family encouraged.
How lucky I was to have had the encouragement.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday February 14, @08:05PM
It was Star Trek that got me started. I need not say more.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Sunday February 16, @06:56AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ichthus on Tuesday February 18, @07:00PM
My parents also gave me a Radio Shack 150 in One kit [radiomuseum.org]. I spent hours wiring up the various projects in the cookbook but, again, didn't entirely understand how everything worked. It was enough to get me going, though.
I've been a computer engineer for about twenty years, and I really enjoy what I do (mostly firmware and small circuit design). I owe my choice of occupation to the nudging and support my parents gave me through grade school.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by deimtee on Wednesday February 19, @08:31PM
I don't know. I was always interested in how things worked from before my earliest memory. My earliest actual "tech" memory is probably building arch structures out of blocks.
One job constant is that good employers have low turnover, so opportunities to join good employers are relatively rare.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by oldeschool on Friday February 21, @05:04AM (1 child)
as a boomer -- an actual boomer - not the i you are older than me boomer -- 50's and 60's sci-fi hooked me, then of course Star Trek sealed it, I wanted to be Scotty, I'll retire at the end of the year, not as a chief engineer but a systems engineer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by oldeschool on Friday February 21, @05:10AM
nice typos boomer, edit better
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Undefined on Sunday February 23, @04:20PM
When I was a little fella back in the 1950's, we had a shortwave radio. I was totally fascinated by both the content, and the fact that this stuff was crossing much of the world to get to me. That led me to electronics, which led me to building computers (out of TTL and 2102 static RAM initially, later the 6800, etc.), which led me to programming, and here I am.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by donkeyhotay on Wednesday February 26, @02:12AM
I grew up during the Space Race, watching all those astronauts and rockets, the guys in Mission Control on their computers. I watched Star Trek when it was in prime time. I think it was inevitable that I would end up working with technology.