- tons of self study while I designed hardware and wrote code on my own
- school, which started showing me more advanced things
- an internship, which exposed me to the real world
I was into computers years and years before college. This was the 1970s, when books on computers were few and far between. I had not heard of Knuth (and if I had, his books might have chased me away) and most of my learning about computers was from Intel datasheets and articles from BYTE and Dr Dobb's Journal. I read about Smalltalk and Pascal and FORTH (and wrote my own FORTH) and C (and mucked around with Tiny C) but didn't really know anything.
School taught me some theory (starting with Knuth and such), but the whole time I was taking classes I was doing my own self-study on things the school didn't offer (mostly I was studying how to write LISP interpreters and compilers, and then how to write video games). School taught me how to teach myself.
The internship taught me about politics and how to work with people, how to work with physical machines (from DEC-10s and large PDP-11s to microcomputers), and Unix systems programming ("Here, kid, photocopy my copy of Lyons Notes, read that and also K&R, and have fun").
I was taking grad-level courses when I realized that I was having more fun writing video games than anything else, and I was not looking forward to spending my last year of school doing the boring graduation requirements courses I'd blown off in favor of just taking more CS. So I dropped out, moved to Silicon Valley and still, 40 years later, don't have a degree, and I'm still reading papers and learning new stuff all the time.
- tons of self study while I designed hardware and wrote code on my own
- school, which started showing me more advanced things
- an internship, which exposed me to the real world
I was into computers years and years before college. This was the 1970s, when books on computers were few and far between. I had not heard of Knuth (and if I had, his books might have chased me away) and most of my learning about computers was from Intel datasheets and articles from BYTE and Dr Dobb's Journal. I read about Smalltalk and Pascal and FORTH (and wrote my own FORTH) and C (and mucked around with Tiny C) but didn't really know anything.
School taught me some theory (starting with Knuth and such), but the whole time I was taking classes I was doing my own self-study on things the school didn't offer (mostly I was studying how to write LISP interpreters and compilers, and then how to write video games). School taught me how to teach myself.
The internship taught me about politics and how to work with people, how to work with physical machines (from DEC-10s and large PDP-11s to microcomputers), and Unix systems programming ("Here, kid, photocopy my copy of Lyons Notes, read that and also K&R, and have fun").
I was taking grad-level courses when I realized that I was having more fun writing video games than anything else, and I was not looking forward to spending my last year of school doing the boring graduation requirements courses I'd blown off in favor of just taking more CS. So I dropped out, moved to Silicon Valley and still, 40 years later, don't have a degree, and I'm still reading papers and learning new stuff all the time.