|
That was in 1978 with a TRS-80 in a Radio Shack. I knew nothing, but that did not stop me from looking into the manual and trying things out.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
I hold an A-7 computer expert classification, Commodore. I'm well acquainted with Dr. Daystrom's theories and discoveries. The basic design of all our ship's computers are JavaScript.
|
|
|
|
|
I was given a copy of an IBM FORTRAN reference manual in the late 1960s from one of my Boy Scout merit badge mentors and until my first programming class in college, I thought FORTRAN was a IBM computer model...found out quickly in class that it was a computer language 
Steve
_________________
I C(++) therefore I am
|
|
|
|
|
I was playing around with flip-flops (the IC's, not the footwear), timers and logic gates before I ever wrote my first program. I cut my programming teeth using BASIC on a PDP-11 and had a pretty thorough understanding of how the machine worked at the ripe old age of 13. I ditched BASIC in favor of 6502 assembly language on the PET and C-64, and then other processors, so I was working always close to the hardware (it was the nature of the work I was getting.)
Marc
|
|
|
|
|
AmigaBASIC, modifying a demo. I only knew that Big Fat Agnus, Paula and Denise were respsonsible for the output, and the result of the tinkering was predictable[^].
I should really get a 512 kb RAM upgrade.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
|
|
|
|
|
Quote: I should really get a 512 kb RAM upgrade.
My first PC was a Step386 with (wait for it) 4 Megabytes of memory, the "Bleading Edge". Paid $1,000.00 for each chip.
Dave.
|
|
|
|
|
First attempts around 7 or 8 years old. Coco basic on a TRS80 color. I had multiple manuals for it, but while I figured out what a for loop could be helpful in drawing figures with ASCII block characters, I was totally baffled by lots of other stuff in it like Boolean Algebra.
Second attempt around 15/16 yo, turbo pascal for dos. I got pointers and boolean logic this time. Mostly to outsmart my teachers ability to grade my work I taught myself OOP (which she admitted to not knowing); but Borlands docs and late 90s internet totally failed to enlighten me about base classes and inheritance leaving me to try rolling my own by using function pointers as a way to effectively overload methods. So close, yet so far.....
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
|
|
|
|
|
In the beginning I have to reset the Spectrum if I made an error typing in the programs from the books or magazines.
|
|
|
|
|
Does knowing to draw a diagonal line across the card deck count so the code still ran after dropping it on the floor?
|
|
|
|
|
In this day when downloads under 1MBS is slow, I wonder how many people know that a card deck box could only hold about 40K. (500 cards, 80 bytes per card. Oh yeah signed bytes, 9 holes per byte) Many full length programs were less than half a box or reading half a box could take over 10 seconds
|
|
|
|
|
Since I started my computer programming by flipping switches on the front of a bare-bones PDP-8 I was probably as computer literate as a 19 year old student could be in 1972.
I quickly moved to assembly language on an Intel 8008 (with a brief spell on the 4004 while waiting for the prototype 8008 to arrive direct from Intel) on a dedicated card that I designed and built myself as a project for my sandwich course with BT (then the GPO).
|
|
|
|
|
I'm so old I can remember when 'Duktape' was called 'Duct Tape'.
And why.
Duktape? Dooktarrpay?
|
|
|
|
|
d@nish wrote: ...you wrote your first program?
Very. First off, it wasn't a program written by me but a long listing from a book into building speakers enclosures (Radio Shack) - me and a buddy skipped classes to take turns entering the whole thing into one of the school lab's TRS-80s... got the supervisor to help us out on attaching a recorder to save it to tape... he asked us if we had ran the program - what do you mean RUN the program? <- us.
Rookie lab assistant comes in with the tape recorder, connects it to the computer, one ZAP! on the screen and I guess I was literate enough to understand the power of the static charge: the bloke caused the TRS-80 to reset and we lost 2 hours of typing in a microsecond. I had read about that in Popular Electronics late 70s.
Six months after me and my posse were banned from the computer lab for a month for installing games in all the lab machines. It could have been that or the "fake" report cards we manufactured for those people in need of presenting something more palatable to their parents than the official ones 
-- RP
|
|
|
|
|
Very...
My first programming experience was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 connected to a TV. Working the graveyard shift, I stayed up one morning to punch in a sample program from book or maybe it was in it's documentation. Hated the membrane keyboard. Hours and a few cups of coffee later I had a battleship game running in console basic. Then I wondered if I could modify it some it could continue to plot the cannon shot up beyond the top of TV screen. I made the change. Try it. It worked. I was hooked.
Of course there was no storage. As soon as I turned it off, everything was gone.
|
|
|
|
|
I was 8 in the start of eighteens, with my brother's brand new Commodore 64, when he was out to play football... 
I didn't speak any word in english, and all user manual was ONLY in english. I started to learn English because I saw the results of keywords when I wrote programs...
|
|
|
|
|
I wrote a sorting program on a Flexowriter and fed the paper tape it into EDSAC 2 at Cambridge University c. 1963. All that I knew about computers was from popular reading about "electronic brains" and the lectures I received from Maurice Wilkes - great researcher but very boring teacher! So I guess I was pretty illiterate!
|
|
|
|
|
Peter Grogono wrote: reading about "electronic brains"
I have this book, "Electronic Brains" written in 1945 in my library.
It states the estimated worldwide market for computers was for maybe as many as five of them.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
|
|
|
|
|
The book I remember best was "Faster than Thought", edited by B V Bowden and published in 1953. I was about 12 when I read it and I did not understand very much!
|
|
|
|
|
IP addresses were defined much later, so it's capacity is much greater than 5. When it was defined it was determined it would have all the communication addresses computers would ever need. Shows how good we humans are at capacity planning when it comes to computers.
|
|
|
|
|
OK, if we skip over my TRS-80 Basic days, and some assembler, we get to my first C program. It was a port of an assembler for a dedicated terminal, to be written in C for an IBM PC.
Now, at that time, Beyond "printf", I had know idea at all about the C standard library, particularly, I knew nothing about malloc & free, so everything was hard allocated as module level variables.
I wrote at length about it before: http://herbsutter.com/2011/10/16/your-first-c-program/#comment-3822[^]
I also dug up the source code to my SECOND major C program (circa 1989), and posted in on GitHub:
https://github.com/jamescurran/HonestIllusion/tree/master/PCT[^]
Truth,
James
|
|
|
|
|
James Curran wrote: I had know idea at all
Phonetically correct, but contextually incorrect.correct: I had no idea at all
Someone else wrote "I now that..." which is both phonetically and contextually incorrect. I have no idea why I didn't feel compelled to correct him two(sic) (There is so much trampling of the English language, I had to get into the act.)
|
|
|
|
|
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away...
we technicians were allowed to learn some programming in our
free time. Fortran and punch cards of course. So me and a buddy
wrote a 'game of life' program that printed the generation
patterns on a line printer. We destroyed several trees
worth of paper. Now at 71, I still program for fun...
(Win 7, C#, intel i7, almost no printing)
73
|
|
|
|
|
d@nish wrote: Edit: The sole purpose of this post is to feel young.
You achieved the opposite:
When I wrote my first program, windows didn't exist, C++ didn't exist.
I did now what an OS was, however: I had the commented assembly listing on my desk! 
|
|
|
|
|
I should say I wanted to feel young. I have no clue what you all are blabbering about. I wan't even born at that time.
|
|
|
|
|
|
My buddy who got me started on computers had given me the book on assembler programming a PDP-8.
For two weeks I struggled, trying to understand registers, opcodes, and binary.
He and his buddy took me to the computer center and while he was off doing something on another computer, his buddy says, "Psst, wanna write a program?"
He started FOCAL and had me type
1.1 Type "HELLO." Now type "GO" and press Return.
It printed
HELLO I yelled, "THAT'S IT? That's all I have to do?!?"
And I was off to the races.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
