One of my few "FOMO" things from my younger years is I missed out on going away to University. My friends who did tell amazing stories, made lifelong friends, and got to learn in detail things that fascinate me.
The problem was money, or lack of, even though the UK is one of the better places for affordability of higher education.
Instead of going to higher education I left full-time school at the tender age of 15.
Fast-forward to 1998 and we’d just got married or were getting married, I can't recall exactly. I had a decent job, and some spare time so I decided it was "now or never" to get that degree.
I applied to the Open University which is the main distance learning organisation in the UK, to the point where their programming was on the regular BBC TV schedule, at least back then. They took into account the further education classes I had taken in night classes and day-release, plus some of my work experience, so I didn't have to start from zero, but still there was a big hill in front of me to climb.
Here’s the main book that accompanied the class (Now including WWW! 🤭). As you can see, it is very much of the time.
I really enjoyed some of the classes, in particular the Smalltalk/OOP programming and the user experience and usability class.
The course was my first introduction to real online courseware, versus the homebrew stuff we had built for the local community college. In that courseware were student discussions, a lot focused on how useless it was to learn Smalltalk!
While I understood their position, and was frustrated by how abstract the work we were doing was (hovering frogs were a substantial motif I recall), learning the "pure" OO of Smalltalk helped me a great deal in other object oriented languages.
Regardless, back then apparently the course was incredibly successful (emphasis mine):
There have been a number of approaches to facilitate teaching Smalltalk. The LearningWorks environment developed by Goldberg is used for the Open Universities course M206 entitled ”Computing: An Object Oriented Approach”. By their own account it is the world largest
computing course with over 5000 students. LearningWorks builds on the VisualWorks Smalltalk product and uses learning books to guide students from small to larger sections of the Smalltalk world
I found a web page that included some of the assignments, check out the frog classes - good job it wasn't a vocational course!
My daughter came along in 1999 and was born super early, and then I immediately lost my newly acquired job, so sadly no degree for me.
It's still something I think about trying for again, partly because I enjoy learning, and partly to see if I could do it.
It sounds like it has been an interesting journey for you. I remember in high school we had a teacher who was pretty well versed in Macs. Like the really really old Macs, years before the iMac, but he didn't now much about PC's. My dad was always into computers and we actually built one of our first ones from an old IBM chassis and parts a guy from church gave us. Anyway, the teacher used to defer to me when he wasn't sure about something on the PC side of things. Pretty cool for a dorky 9th grader!
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My computing education started in about 1979 when I went to upper school and the maths teacher did a lunchtime computing club. We were doing BASIC and I took to it quickly. We did not even have a computer at the school and used a Teletype to connect to the local college machine. This is my maths and computing teacher who worked at the Open University for a while.
I knew about Smalltalk, but I don't think I ever used it. I got into some object oriented stuff later on.
Back then we couldn't imagine the web and all it would bring. Computers were just for the geeks, like me.
That kind of "FOMO" seemed to have worked out great for you! ;-)
I started my CS learning process in the 90s too. When the first CS-related subject was introduced to the curricula, I was in the middle school, I had no idea what that was and thought it was about something else. I quickly began to understand and like it and has marked the rest of my formal education. Started with Basic, in high school I switched to Pascal, C, C++ (including the bases of OOP). I think my fist DBMS was Foxpro briefly learned in high school. Many more languages followed, learned at the university or by myself later on.