User:JasonPierce

Jason Pierce is an IT Professional living in Austin, TX. He taught himself how to program at the age of 11 on an 8-bit Atari 800XL. The Atari 800XL platform was the third iteration of Atari's plunge into the game/PC hybrid market that initially began in 1983. His mom originally purchased the system for him to play games, but he noticed during its first boot-up that it included a built-in Atari BASIC programming language. A language so "basic" that he had to manually number each line of code. Nevertheless, it intrigued him from the start, and he immediately fell in love with the power to "make" the Atari obey his juvenile commands - such as producing sound patterns that mimicked the whirring blades of a helicopter.