alt Hacker NewsWhen I was a kid and read 800 Leagues I proceeded to make a whole encryption IDE in Visual Basic 6 for a programming fair that year. I called it "Crypt+". It even had C++ dll based encryption engine plugins.
The funny thing is that I got that book as a prize from a previous year's programming fair.
Nice.
However, I was a kid in the seventies, when PCs were still in the future, so I had to practice cryptography with pen and paper.
While in high school, I wrote my first programs, but at that time this was done by writing the program (e.g. in FORTRAN) on a special printed form, on a grid where each character was accurately positioned, then the form was given to an operator who transferred the written program on 80-column punched cards, and then the next day you could retrieve the printed results from running your program on an IBM mainframe (printed with a 132-column line printer), together with the deck of punched cards, to be used if you wanted to rerun the program (which you almost always wanted to do, even if the program had been intended to be run only once, because your first attempt of running might have printed only compiler error messages).
There has been a long journey from that until being able to use VB6 or Visual C++.