This is my mess when I have a problem.
Computer Experience
Built my first computer on a bread board in 197- something using Intel's 4004 chip (4-bit), the color burst crystal from a tv, four micro toggle switches, a pushbutton switch and GE's nixie tubes for output. Had to enter the code in binary - one instruction or one piece of data at a time - via the toggleswitches and used the pushbutton to enter this binary value for each instruction and data into memory. Had the ability to address a huge amount of memory - 1024 bits (1K)! Took me twelve minutes to enter my first program and get it right - find the square root of 49! Won't tell you how many components I burned up trying to get it to work.
Was really fun back when... - first you breadboarded the circuit, then you designed the mask for a printed circuit board, then you drew the mask, then you etched a blank board in acid, then drilled the holes by hand one at a time, then soldered in the components, pluged it in and waited with breath held hoping nothing would smoke - cause then you got to start all over! Got really interesting when they came out with double-sided circuit boards! Really tested the marriage when you stunk up the house with the etching process and then burned up the circuit board too! Now the boards are layered and the hobbiest is a thing of the past.
From there I went to the 8008, then I fell in love with the Z80 and Z80A by Zilog, but alas they had hired the marketing execs from Sony who wanted to keep the Beta VCR format propriatary and they thought they could keep the Z80A inhouse. Enjoyed playing with Motorola's 68000 series of processors too (personally I think they were better than the Intel set of processors but marketing is as important as capabilities). As Paul Harvey says ... Intel is the rest of the story as they brought out the 8086 and then the 80286, etc.etc.
Along the way I learned the following operating systems to some varied degree of expertise: HDOS, DrDOS, MS-DOS, CPM, unix, VMS, TI-DOS, Windows, and Amiga DOS
My one comment on todays programmers - If you had to program for my teachers you would get straight C's. When I took programming it went this way - If your program worked you got a C, if you compiled to with in 10% of the instructor's compiled executable you got a B, you had to write and compile a program (that worked) equal to or smaller than the instructors to get an A!
Also along the way I learned to program in: Basic, VB, Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, C, and of course the various macro programming languages for spreadsheet and database manipulation.
Not too sure where Java-script and HTML fall in - the lines seem to be disappearing - but I do a little of both.
Wrote programming tutorials for several disk based periodicals for a while, and had a nice custom programming business going for a while in the 80's, then the Army sent me overseas again and it went down the drain.
Now I help folks in the area, design small business systems for friends, build and repair puters, and surf.
Took from 1966, when I was kicked out of college and got drafted, to 1990 before I got a Bachelors degree - one class per semester all over the world!
This is my mess when I have a problem.