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must have been 1984
commodore 64 basic v2
38911 bytes free
the book was in German, useless to me.
first program:
10 PRINT "YOUR NAME";
20 GOTO 10
i wanted to do something colorful with graphics. i used to peek and poke it's memory and found out the screen map at address 1024-2023 and the color ram at address 55296-56295.
c64 had a terrible basic. as soon as possible i moved to machine language.
i don't know what was my first program, but i'll always remember my effort to move a sprite from left to right on the screen in assembly.
it took me about 10 careful rechecks and restarts of the program to realize that it is working correctly and that it is moving the sprite soooo fast that i am unable to see it. it only appeared at the final coordinate.
for comparison, in basic to increase the X coordinate of a sprite in a tight loop as fast as possible would crawl the sprite from left to right.
assembly language was the kind of revelation you see in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the monkey faces the monolith.
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1982 Apple BASIC on an Apple][ with 48k memory. Had a cassette tape recorder for storage and retrieval - no hard disk or floppies.
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Early 80's BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20
My parent's wouldn't buy a ZX-81 as it didn't have a proper keyboard, so I wouldn't be able to learn to type on it.
I still can't touch type to this day!
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Many years ago, I bought my first computer, a Commodore VIC 20.
Shortly thereafter, my dad bought a Commodore 64, but when he realised it was harder to use a computer (at that time, before Windows and Internet) than he had thought, he swapped me for my VIC 20, because he thought that I'd have a better use for the powerful Commodore 64, and he could make do with the less powerful VIC 20. 
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain
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When I was a teenager, I first had a Sinclair ZX-81, came with 1k RAM< expanded to 16k I wrote a few simple little basic programs on that, but nothing close to any production material. It could be done, even with it's sh*tty graphics; I had a cassette loading version of the popular game Frogger.
I upgraded to a ZX Spectrum about a year later, and also only really fooled around with it's BASIC. Typed in lots of machine code hex listings from magazines thought, for some pretty cool little games.
"'Do what thou wilt...' is to bid Stars to shine, Vines to bear grapes, Water to seek its level; man is the only being in Nature that has striven to set himself at odds with himself."
—Aleister Crowley
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I had Digi-comp 2, and later, 1.
Digi-comp 2 was powered by falling marbles, and the gates could be preset to sort the marbles in different ways.
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I think it was 2300 B.C. I wrote a grain inventory program for the Abacus system using Cuneiform++.
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In 1975(?) I took a Saturday morning course for high school students at the local community college in FORTRAN on a Burroughs minicomputer. As I recall, I never did get a program to work. My first working programs were in Tiny BASIC on my stepdad's COSMAC ELF-II[^] single board computer, based on the RCA 1802 microprocessor. I also wrote a lot of programs for the TI-59[^] programmable calculator my parents bought me for high school graduation.
My first professional programming in 1980 was on an HP 1000[^] series minicomputer in FORTRAN 66. I was a sophomore in college and was paid the whopping sum of $6.00 per hour.
Not to be cliché, but - good times.
Software Zen: delete this;
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TRS-80 Model 1 level 2 BASIC. Was barely in 1st grade. My dad had built and modded a second one so I got the first one with a cassette player, some games, and a library or magazines to "play". I managed to code a couple really simple games, choose your adventure, and a failed attempt at a Pong like game. (Graphical programming was hard for my 8 year old brain) One program I had was a menu for programs on a cassette. Menu program was at beginning of tape and had a directory of the apps and their tape counter location. Fast forward the tape to counter nnn and CLOAD.
Fast forward 5 or so years and I got a 2nd hand 286 IBM compatible PC. Played around with GW-BASIC and actually started digging into Batch scripting. During high school I tinkered with QuickBASIC and DBASE (yes i consider it a programming language) but had found that all i would do is make menu and UI shells for the batch utils i made. I took more to the hardware/networking side of things.
It wasn't until a few years out of college that I got my first professional opportunity. VB6 and Office VBA migration to .NET solutions. And here I am.
Its sorta funny how I find myself doing the same sorts of things over a 30 year span.. Like little scripts and utilities and then building simple menu based UIs to navigate those utils.
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Around 1980 - Commodore Pet at high school. 4K and 1MHz, I believe. Came complete with cassette recorder so we could even save our programs.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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My high school in the early 80s had these TRS-80s from Radio Shack. There was one course offered, BASIC.
We saved our homework on cassette tapes. Each of the four or so computers had an old-style cassette tape recorder connected to it somehow. I remember a friend of mine and I were curious about what would happen if we played them as audio. I think it was just kind of random static.
Off to college, various courses, starting with Fortran and assembler on a VAX 11/780.
First professional experience was in EDL on an old IBM Series/1. This was very much like assembler; to debug, you'd get a printout of your program, on the left-hand side of which was the compiled machine language. Setting breakpoints at addresses, inspecting memory directly, etc.
I feel like that was a good experience, made it easier to understand how software is actually executed by seeing some of the under-the-hood post-compilation results.
Through COBOL, C, java, C#, blah, blah, blah.
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First program in 1964 on a Univac Digital Trainer in binary - no assembler or other gewgaws.
Many commercial computers later, I built a Heathkit H8 in 1977 and used it to compute golf handicaps and other simple tasks.
Now, I play with Raspberry Pi, WeMos D1 Mini, etc.
I also placed in the age category.
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1969, FORTRAN via punch cards on an IBM 370. The procedure was:
1. Punch cards
2. Submit deck
3. Wait somewhere between 5 minutes and several hours
4. Pickup output listing
5. Find typo or logic error
6. Repeat
I think the program had something to do with using Simpson's Rule.
Later on I did a lot of programming on a HP 2100 mini-computer via paper tape on a teletype machine. I remember trying to get something working late on day and out of frustration I randomly typed 'why' at the prompt. The computer responded with 'Why not'.
HP published all the details on the machine, include the assembly language source code for the OS. I decided to figure out where the 'Why not' was coming from. It was extremely well disguised so it took a couple of hours to find it. It's pretty easy to disguise stuff in assembly language.
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Back in the 70's I got this educational thingy called "CARDIAC". Was a cardboard tool to demonstrate the workings of a computer. Had sections for memory and registers, and you would write in with pencil your program, and execute the instructions, etc. Very simple, but showed me enough to get me hooked.
High school we had access to an old HP computer. Had a 80 character, single line LED display, card reader, plotter, thermal printer, and 4K of core RAM. Lots of fun doing plots and such. Also the school had an 1802 kit that I would do assembler coding on.
First real computer was a TRS-80, and first computer job was during the summer when I was 15, writing some office software on a UCSD Pascal system. And I haven't stopped since 😉
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January 1974. FORTRAN, punch cards, IBM 1130. Loved and hated it.
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Also FORTRAN and punch cards on an IBM1130 (4K RAM). In high school, might have been around 1972.
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Lots of interesting replies. Here's mine. We had a Computer Club at my grammar school in 1966 run by one of the science teachers. We learnt about binary numbers & how computers (at that time) worked. We had some type of primitive system that was collectively programmed to solve simple math/logic problems and show the answers in binary using lights on or off. My first real programming experience was learning Fortran at the end of 2nd year Civ. Eng. degree in 1969. For some unknown reason, after the exams we had a 2 week course each morning waiting for exam results to be published. Needless to say, we spent most of our time partying & so often had less than clear heads in the morning. For the first couple of days of the Fortran course I couldn't make any sense of it. How could i = i + 1? Then it suddenly clicked & I was hooked. The next year I did my 3rd year project programming a simulation of a water resources system to optimize withdrawals from different sources to meet the demand from a nearby city. It was punched cards which were delivered to the Computer Dept. on the other side of campus. If you submitted by 11am, you got your print out the next day. If not you had to wait until the day after. From there I moved to Canada to do a Masters including a thesis developing/programming a deterministic conceptual hydrologic model. This led to a 40+ year career as a water resources consulting engineer doing computer modelling. At first, we did lots of programming but eventually pre-packaged models took over so I kept up my interest as a recreational programmer with a C64, etc. learning various languages, etc. continuing up to today.
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Wow. In all my years of programming (since 1974), I never had a problem with I=I+1. Maybe it was the way it was taught - as an assignment, not as a mathematical identity. When I read your post, my first reaction was, why didn’t that bother me at the time? Not enough imagination, I guess.
modified 4-Nov-19 9:42am.
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1964, IBM 1620, 20K bytes memory, assembly and Fortran II (I'm 80). 
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From the first line of code to transitioning from an Auto Mechanic to a professional Software Developer.
1977 (ish): Writing Basic code on a Bally Entertainment System, wrote a simple Multi-Die + Adjustments dice rolling routine for D&D. Had to load and save via cassette tape.
Late 1977: Followed shortly thereafter by an Apple II+ that my dad received for his office. Wrote several D&D applications where I could run a random campaign pretty easily. Unfortunately, it was at his office most of the time.
1982: A KayPro II luggable continuously borrowed from a neighbor who didn't care to use it (it was supplied through his emplyer). I finally had something I could use on a regular basis. Ported all of my D&D code from the Apple II+ to the KayPro and wrote even more stuff for our D&D campaigning. 
1983: Life happened... Didn't touch a computer for 5 years.
1988: Discovered BBS's via a friend of mine who ran one. Rented to own an 10Mhz IBM XT clone, taught myself QuickBasic and Pascal. Quickly acquired 2 80286 machines. Taught myself C. Picked up an 80386 machine. Ran a BBS of my own, wrote BBS Doors, other utilities.
1990: I was hired as a programmer writing billing and management code for a company (now defunct) in Carrollton Tx. The journey begins!
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IBM 709 in Machine Language then assembler then FORTRAN in early 1961. Still writing code but in higher level languages.
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The first actual programming I did was on a Apple II sometime in the early 80's. I programmed generating and storing character sheets for D & D. I programmed in Apple Basic, but I THINK the actual Basic program code was written by Micro-Soft, if I remember correctly.
What got me interested in programs themselves was my first computer, a TRS-80, from 1978. I had a game called Pursuit of the Graf Spee. You had to load it from a cassette tape using a standard player connected to the computer by an audio patch cable. I discovered if you hit the Break characters (don't remember if it was Cntrl-C or not) the program would stop, you could see the code that made up the game, and you could alter the ship's performance.
You alternated sitting at the keyboard/screen. The German Player would enter his move/speed, then the British would enter theirs. The British had more ships, but the fast ones were out-gunned by the Spee and the big gun Rodney was too slow to catch it in a race. Unless like me you hit the Program Break and altered the code before starting the game for real. You could change it so that you had incredible amounts of fuel, travel at 99 knots and have a ridiculous number of guns and armor. You could only have 2 digit numbers for turrets, armor and guns per turret on the ship, but that let you put 99 turrets, with 99 guns each. And 99 inches of armor.
It was a fun trick to play once on someone, but the game alterations weren't saved so you had to alter the code each time, and you had to do it without the other player knowing you did it. But it was fun looking through the code and figuring out what commands/code did what, and how they set up the situation and what percentages they assigned different actions and what they did to keep track of the 5 or 6 ships the 2 players controlled.
When I went to school the beginner languages taught was Fortran and Pascal, with C being what was pushed for advanced language. COBOL still was taught but it was an optional class.
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1969 assembly language on a Varian Associates 620i 16 bit computer with 4k of core memory. Teletype punch paper tape to load program, after manually entering bootstrap program from front panel switches. System used to control and record data from a Farrington Electronics OCR page reader.
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I would have been four in 1960, OP. Still interested in magnets, toads, bicycles and bunnies. I could already read comic books by then, so my fate was sealed. First real was Fortran and BASIC in whatever year Reagan was elected President. I think Windows 1.0 was still about seven years away?
Reading all the replies, I have to say it's nice to have someone my own age to play with.
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No punch card machine at the high school I attended; our 'punch' cards had to be filled in by hand using Sharpies, sent out 2x a week to the one high school in the area that had a computer we could get some processing time on, and we got to do a field trip every two weeks to that school so that we got a total of 5-6 tries maybe in a 2 week period to get our FORTRAN programs correct.
That inspired me though, so over the next summer I spent my babysitting money on a COSMAC Elf (RCA 1802) kit, taught myself assembly language and eventually abandoned my plans to become a veterinarian even though the state university I attended starting that fall didn't quite have such a thing as a degree in computer anything.
~ janet
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