Jobs were on offer to anyone who could learn even a little coding. But companies around the world were realizing they were invaluable for any task that required a lot of rapid-fire accounting, like tallying up payroll. So his mother suggested something weird and newfangled: What about… computer programming?Ĭomputers, in 1969, were still strange new curiosities, the size of big cabinets. “My father knew I couldn’t hammer two pieces of wood together,” he laughs. His father was a carpenter, but good luck following in his family’s footsteps Thomas was all thumbs. He was a kid just out of high school in Toronto, without any particular life goal.
When Thomas first started programming, it was 1969.
