The C programming language

Rubbish. My first language was BASIC (like so many kids in the late 1970s), followed quickly by 1802 and 6502 machine language (no compiler - stuff entered in hex), then, about six years after I started programming, C. Working at SRC in 1984, I saw that we had a UNIX machine nestled amongst the VAXen running VMS. It was a VAX-11/750 w/2Mb RAM and two RK07 drives. I don't have the drives (they were discarded in 1992), but I do have _that_ 11/750 (s/n BT000354) now upgraded to 8Mb w/SI9900, Fuji Eagle, etc. We swapped out different sets of RK07 packs to run various Unices to conform to the customer's configuration - 4.0BSD, 4.1BSD and SYSIII, IIRC. I still have the VAX SYSIII tapes somewhere, but who knows if they are still legible after all this time. Anyway, way back then, I'd heard about UNIX and decided I wanted a piece of it. I got an account, borrowed a copy of the K&R book and used it as a reference to write my first C program. It was an abomination as far as style goes, but it did work - it converted a text table of board handle numbers into a formatted picture of the contents of all of our PDP-11 and VAXen, a job I'd do today in perl and probably HTML. What I've found from personal experience is that to really _learn_ a programming language, I need a project to keep me going past the learning cliff.