The first computer for which I wrote programs was located about 80 miles from the VAX terminal in the public library where I worked. in 1976. I was writing in BASIC just for fun, but when my library position was defunded, that fun led to an academic year at the local community college studying computer programming and systems analysis, with curriculum emphasis on COBOL, which I never used. That year led to a second Associate's degree. Then, because I had taken the FORTRAN IV course as an elective and I already knew BASIC, I was hired by Corning Glass Works as Process Control Programmer in one of the factories where most of the production line computers were programmed in Industrial BASIC, but the newest one was programmed in FORTRAN IV.
I was in the factory for four years before transferring to the Engineering Division, where I spent the dullest year of my life writing accounting programs. During that year, the division bought a few of the early IBM PCs. They looked like toys to me, so I was in the office evenings and weekends playing with Lotus 1-2-3, the only program that came loaded on them. As I result, I learned a bit about operating a PC and about the software, so I transferred to one of the engineering departments in the role of PC "expert".
After four years in that role, the company fell on hard times and disbanded the Engineering Division. At the same time, one of the librarians in the Research Division's Technical Information Center quit. The supervisor had to hire from within the company and I was the only employee with the required Master's Degree in Library Science who was looking for a job, so I was hired. There, I wrote programs in a proprietary language to automate the library catalog and the circulation system, making the catalog available online to all company employees. I also did the usual book cataloging and classification, as well as providing some of the reference service. That's the job I retired from.