I believe I started on the program hanging out at Radio Shack in the evenings programming the display TRS-80 (There were no other computers around). I continued it on the school's Commodore Pet a year later. It went through several revisions. It got so I could write the first few hundred lines in BASIC just from memory!

C++ would be an awesome language for a generator. Sounds like you came along about 10 or 15 years after me.

I wonder how many times this same problem has been solved by new programmers eager to "do something"?

Yep dice are fun. Looking up everything in one of those tables is not.