|
15. My High School had a Teletype terminal with paper tape punch/reader connected via 300 baud modem to a GE Timesharing mainframe and we programed in a dialect of BASIC that required line numbers.
|
|
|
|
|
10 years old - Coleco Adam writing code in SmartBasic! 
|
|
|
|
|
8, BASIC on a VIC-20 in 1982.
|
|
|
|
|
I was about 8, after getting a TRS"Trash"-80 for Christmas. Writing in good old Basic. Goto's and all.
|
|
|
|
|
5/6 years old, on Basic on a Sinclair's Z80 Clone
I'm on a Fuzzy State: Between 0 an 1
|
|
|
|
|
9 years old in 1971 - my Dad was taking a course and showed me how to fill out "bubble cards" (computer cards that you filled in circles in pencil rather than punched them out) in Fortran:
program add
print *, "7 + 5", 7 + 5
end
|
|
|
|
|
1971, eleven - timesharing basic on a PDP-8, and some weird s**t assembler for an old phillips bunny hopper machine that had been donated to my school in pieces - we rebuilt the sucker, learned to bootstrap it by trial and error, and wrote lots of adventure/star trek type games.
Ah! real programming with grease under the fingernails! and yes, at first, smoke tests really were.
you young turks really have it easy these days  .
Nothing is impossible, we just don't know the way of it yet.
|
|
|
|
|
15 years old, in high school, using an ASR33 Teletype connected at an amazing 110 baud to a Univac 1106 (with FASTRAND drum instead of disk, that oughta date it). Language was something new called Dartmouth BASIC. Second semester we moved to FORTRAN and punched cards, third semester was ALGOL. The Univac was given to the school district as surplus from the early Apollo work by a local NASA contractor.
Then I would go home at night and do my Calculus homework on stone tablet using a flint chisel......
Jack Peacock
|
|
|
|
|
I became a software engineer a little later than most of you, probably. I started out as a hardware technician back in the '70s after a 6 year stint in the Army but had a serious interest in the software side of things. Especially since I could see that I wouldn't be "fixing" computers too much longer as everything started to become more modularized. All I was was a highly trained "board swapper" at the end.
So, in 1980 I made the big jump to becoming a programmer. My first job was as a hardware diagnostics developer. A natural beginning for someone who was hardware-centric for over a decade. I gradually moved to being a firmware developer (another natural progression) until the late '90s when I made the jump to more business-related programming, which I am still doing today.
Along the way I migrated from assembler to Clipper for dBase to C to HTML to Classic ASP to VB6 to .NET VB and C#. So I'm basically a jack of all trades (and master of most!!)
And with the data side of things, from dBase II to Microsoft Access to SQL Server and Oracle.
|
|
|
|
|
on Atari Basic, with 5.25" floppy disk, Atari 2600 console.
using the "Atari User Manual", howww...along time ago!, I was like 11.great days!!!!!  
|
|
|
|
|
12 in QuickBASIC
14 Turbo c++
CPallini wrote: You cannot argue with agile people so just take the extreme approach and shoot him.
:Smile:
|
|
|
|
|
I was 15 when I wrote my first programs on a ZX-Spectrum 48K. Using that one-key command language it featured.
|
|
|
|
|
17. Fortran on punch cards submitted to an IBM 360/50 in 1974. That's all it took and I was hooked for life.
|
|
|
|
|
First "line" of code - 1975 - using Microsoft basic, loaded onto an IMSAI by paper tape.
First "code" - punched an IBM card to write code for a Wang Nixie Tube calculator - 1969.
|
|
|
|
|
16. I used BASIC and FORTRAN II, which should give you an idea how long ago that was.
|
|
|
|
|
About 14 (mid '70s). I think it was a PDP-11, used a 300 baud modem to connect with it as it was in the school district's admin office. Used thermal paper output. We must have wasted the equivalent of reams of paper writing and playing our Star Trek program in BASIC!! Looked at it few years later in college, what a mass of spaghetti code!!
|
|
|
|
|
7 ish BBC Microcomputer
1984
type 'old' then 'list' after hitting the break key during a game and then randomly changing lines of code to see what happened. This progressed into changing in game messages to say rude stuff.
|
|
|
|
|
14, 1970, Fortran IV, punchcards (if you don't count the "Minivac" 3 years before, but that wasn't code, it was wires and diodes and resistors and blinking lights). We had to write a program to sort three numbers from lowest to highest. I was hooked.
But the fun really began when I learned that a crash wasn't fatal, and that nobody outside the room (teacher) would ever know.
Crash machine, freak out classmates, reset.
Cool.
|
|
|
|
|
For Christmas '83, my parents got us a TI-99/4a. I had just turned 17. While my brother was only fascinated with the games, I was more curious about the blue screen with the prompt. My first program in Basic simply accepted two numbers as input and displayed their sum. It wasn't long before I discovered how to make the screen change colors, and generate sound. What fun! By New Years, I had a program that played the opening bars of the 'Star Spangled Banner' with the screen flashing red, white, and cyan.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
|
|
|
|
|
I was 13 or 14 years old, back in 86 when I discovered LOGO in a technical magazine. And for the first 3 years, I learned programming and wrote programs on ... notebooks  The lightest and most portable ones, totally "green", and made entirely from ... paper[^]. The turtle did really amazing things ... in the virtual machine from my mind.
(I didn't got access to a real computer at that time  )
Then, two years later I discovered a local computers club and joined it. When I went there, the teacher asked me: "Have you ever worked on a computer? Do you know anything about any programming language?" and I answered proudly "I know LOGO!" In that moment all the faces turned amazed to me, and the teacher told me "Well, it's time to give up to childish things and start learning a real language: BASIC" and he pulled me gently in front of the first computer I ever saw: HC 85 [^]
(If anyone is missing it's tape sound, you can hear it back here [^])
And one of the very first programs I wrote was a ... 3D graphics app, representing wireframe objects define through vertexes. I'll never forget the Bresenham's line algorithm[^] and Bézier curve[^]. AutoDesk, watch your back! I'm coming !!!
Great times
|
|
|
|
|
I was 6 years old on a Sinclair ZX81 Basic.
|
|
|
|
|
17, which is NBD (no big deal), but I'd just turned 17 back in the summer of 1968 between my junior and senior year in HS. Taking "introduction to engineering nsf" classes at OSU. FORTRAN with 029 punch-card with IBM 7090 main-frame, iirc. One job-card a day.
"You kids have it sooooo easy."
Went from being a "wrench" day-dreaming about Corvettes and Z/28's and figuring to eventually work in Detroit, to absolutely gob-smacked by these new-fangled computers. A life changing experience.
TMI? ... I can recall my at-the-time GF experiencing MEGO (my eyes glaze over) while I explained ... in detail ... how a software program to find "perfect right-angle integer triangles" worked. That was pretty much the end of that. Sigh.
|
|
|
|
|
12 years old in 1979 on an Atari 400, if you can believe that. Not even a 5.25-inch diskette - It was a BASIC cartridge! A few years ago I tracked down an old Atari 400 on eBay that I now display proudly in my office...
Isn't it funny how most of us started programming around puberty? Explains so much about my love life!!
|
|
|
|
|
I was around 7 years old with a Timex Synclair. From their to a kaypro and a TRS-80 CoCo 2.
|
|
|
|
|
15, using Fortran. Assembler quickly followed. I was working at a summer job. This led to a full-time job.
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
