• Question: From what age did you decided you wanted to be a computer scientist?

    Asked by darcie123 on 27 Oct 2025.
    • Photo: Martin McMahon

      Martin McMahon answered on 27 Oct 2025:

      I can’t say I decided to be a computer scientist at any age, but I did choose to study computers for my GCSE’s back in 1983-5. This was the dawn of the computer era where normal people started to get access to them. We worked on PCs that were called the Electron, Atom, BBC Micro, ZX81, Spectrum, Apricot, Commodore 64 and a few others. I learned to read something called Ticker Tape, and program computers with punch cards, and one advanced computer language was called Fortran. Today you measure computer memory in GBs but we measured it in KBs (1 million times smaller), and my first computer had just 1KB of memory.

    • Photo: John Easton

      John Easton answered on 30 Oct 2025:

      I guess I would have been about 13 and like Martin it would have been in that early 1980s timeframe when I first came into contact with a computer at school (a Commodore PET). Since then I’ve been using computers as tools every so often to help me do what I needed when I was at college and university. I then started using them fulltime once I entered the world of work. I’d never call myself a computer scientist, but I use IT technologies to solve problems. And yes, some of that involves some science (mostly physics) and some maths (but not much beyond GCSE-level) but I’ve never studied computer science formally.

    • Photo: Richard Fitzpatrick

      Richard Fitzpatrick answered on 3 Nov 2025:

      For me it was quite late! I really enjoyed using computers, but I liked Biology more. It wasn’t until after I had been to University that I felt combining the two together would be more interesting for what I wanted to know more about in Biology. So I was about 22.

      Although I’m still not sure if I am a computer scientist still! I feel like I use computers and tools a lot, but I don’t really make anything new with them.

    • Photo: Sam Brown

      Sam Brown answered on 6 Nov 2025:

      I was in my teens around 13 years old. My classes involved studying and writing code which I really enjoyed. From there I decided to study Computer science in my A-levels but even though I did not immediately become a computer scientist I aways wanted to be one.

    • Photo: Neil Barnby

      Neil Barnby answered on 17 Nov 2025:

      When I was 8 years old I wanted to build robots, so I guess that was the start of it.

    • Photo: Henry Duke

      Henry Duke answered on 25 Nov 2025:

      My dad got me my first book on programming when I was 6 (that was in 1987), he and I worked through it, trying to make a game work in BASIC on a Spectrum 128. That was where it all started for me.

Comments

  • Photo: aureliabrzezowska

    aureliabrzezowska commented on :

    I’d say I knew from around GCSE time. I chose computing because I enjoyed it and happened to be good at it. I carried this onto a-levels and later university. One thing you need to consider is that not every aspect of computing will be your favourite! I hated coding, the law side but I fell in love with Linux, network security and more. There are so many different sides to computing and all you need to do is find your passion.