Where did you start programming?

[Shield]

I was so proud of it (I was 10?) but she just looked at me as though I were an idiot.

Happened to me too. I was (and I'm still) fascinated by the stuff I can do on a computer that other people can't,
even the very simple ones (heck when I first drew some stuff on a screen I was like: magic. ).

[MachineCode]

(heck when I first drew some stuff on a screen I was like: magic. ).

Amen, brother! I remember in high school when a friend and I made a solid black square sprite on the C64 move across the screen, pixel-by-pixel. His reaction was: "So smooth!" And I agreed. It was awesome.

But I also realised it was slow. How did people make sprites move fast? Took me another week for the penny to drop: don't move one pixel at a time, but maybe 5 or 10! Wow, now the black square FLEW across the screen! Great times.

[BorisTheOld]

Late in 1961 I came across "A Guide to FORTRAN Programming" by Danial D. McCraken, and convinced my college to let me do a fluid flow simulation for my engineering thesis. Once a week I'd take a train ride to London to run my card deck at the IBM Data Centre.

Been programming ever since -- and loving it.

[luis]

I was so proud of it (I was 10?) but she just looked at me as though I were an idiot.

This bring to memory a similar situation.
I was young and I had written a Basic's version of the famous Conway's LIFE using an Olivetti M24 (was a fast DOS machine here in Italy at the time). I read the rules and implemented them. The computer wasn't mine. I was fascinated to see the various formations evolve, move, and die.
The son of the owner (about my age) seemed curios about what I was doing, so I explained to him what was the program about.
He looked at me with transparent glazed eyes and asked "why you did it ? it has no use."
My first reaction was incredulity... how one can not see the grandiosity of it ?

About the paper, yes the battery life of that medium is still unmatched.
I was using paper because I didn't have a computer, so I bought the manual of a ZX-80 (in italian because didn't know english at the time), I read it and then I started to write simple programs on paper to execute them later using my finger as the instruction pointer. Sad.

Some time later, I finally bought my first computer, a VIC 20. I still have it.

[Zebuddi123]

Amiga 500 plus pack workbench 1.3 Brilliant chipset and OS for it`s day. 1st bought an Atari ST the guy in dixons said it could emulate an IBM to run NicBase (was really into chess at the time) was none the wiser had never played with a computer so i got an amiga and decided to write an application to animate my games to see where i could improve

Then i bought a Novag Constellation Expert and play chess on that.

Ansi C, Asm, Amiga E, Amos, BlitzBasic & now Purebasic the most tolerant and forgiving of programming languages.

How many times when you were learning pointers & stuff did you totally BSD your machine.

But alas Still none the wiser but it keeps me entertained.

Zebuddi.

[Kurzer]

I was born in '68 and I started programming on a pocket computer in the 80th : Sharp PC-1401 (Basic)
Then...
VIC-20 (Basic)
C-64 (Baisc & 6510 ASM, I wrote my first own "assembler" in Basic and wrote my first ASM programms as Opcodes ($28, $45, $33 ... and so on). The mnemonics where translated in realtime in my brain )
Amiga 500/2000 (68030 Assembler [Seka & DevPack Assebmler], Amos Basic, Kick Pascal, Arexx [wrote Arexxscripts to extend the fabulous CED editor into a fully Assembler development studio].) Wrote Intros, Games and Tools on this wonderful machine. That was a great time!
PC 368 (Quickbasic, PowerBasic)
PC Pentium class (PureBasic)

I'm not able to reconstruct my personal 'computer timeline' but between the end of the amiga area and my first steps on the PC there are many many years of 'only reallife'.

[luis]

The mnemonics where translated in realtime in my brian

The dog is a programmer's best friend



Brian Griffin

[Kurzer]

LOL - Thanks luis, you made my day.

Learning foreign languages ​​was unfortunately never my favorite subject in school.

[infratec]

Hi,

I started like kurzer:

SHARP PC-1211 (I still own it)
And since I didn't want a VC64 I got a SHARP MZ-721 (Z80 CPU)
But... no software available, so I had o write my own.
And since it needs so long to load BASIC via the tape, I used also hand typed Z80 opcodes
to 'poke' the program direct into memory.

Than I bought a SHARP PC (an IBM-XT clone without harddisk (8088 CPU))
Later I bought the schematic and implemented an extension board to use addon cards.
Mainly a harddisk controller with a 10MB harddisk (still in my cellar)

My first freeware for PCs was an accurate SHARP MZ-700 emulator (the fastest you can get )

Programming languages ???
I always say it's not a question of the language, the syntax is learned fast, it's a question of logic thinking.

If you can program you can use any language.
Especially if you started with assembler.

Bernd

[fsw]

First programming: on a TI calculator with no memory cards.
(forgot which model, had only 99 memory slots for the code; you switch off the calculator and the program is gone...)

First programming on a workstation: AutoLisp
(was a parenthesis nightmare but powerful; don't think someone uses it anymore..)

[Shield]

Lisp is still used in the industry (and I like to use it sometimes too).
AFAIK it is often used to program artificial intelligence and self-modifying / learning systems
because it is a very simple and yet powerful language concept.

Then again, it is a parenthesis nightmare.

[WilliamL]

TRS-80 with the system loaded from cassette. Huge block graphics.

[Baldrick]

Same as williamL. My 1st was an old TRS80. I had a bit of a mentor back in those days & learned to program with it using a plug in cartridge which was 'Editor Assembler with Z bug'. ( Early 80's)
I actually still have a big box full of the old CoCo magazines here somewhere which were just full of programs which you type in yourself then if you want you could save to cassette tape.
I even remember coming up with a 4 line routine using peek & poke which I used to sneak into stores where these machines were on display. I would break into the display programs, slap these 4 lines in randomly & when the display program would hit my code it would send the screen all colors, display all ascii letters, etc & so on until they reloaded the display program

[Kukulkan]

Started with a C64 being 12 Years old.

After doing Basic, I learned Assembler on 6510 CPU on C64.
Then I went on with an Amiga 2000 (with Retina graphics card, MIDI interface and Toccata soundcard).
Later on, I touched x286 and x386 to develop CNC transmission software and some sort of stuff using GW Basic and QBasic.
Then I bought my first PC with Windows 95 (yes, I had some Win 3.11 at work before but I did not like).

Today developing using PureBasic, PHP and HTML/CSS/JS mainly on Windows, but also on Linux and MacOS.

Kukulkan

[Tenaja]

So, is PureBasic the language of "the old?" Looks like most the respondents to this thread learned on a 6502.

I learned on a 6502. Basic was too slow, so I learned machine code. I didn't know where to get an assembler, but the bookstore had a book on machine code, so I was hand assembling. Wow, what a godsend when I found an assembler.