PureBasic Forums - English

Tenaja wrote:So, is PureBasic the language of "the old?"

Define old.

Those of you who are not old haven't missed anything. Programming is essentially the same as it was 50 years ago. Programs are still buggy and poorly documented, and programmers still make the same stupid mistakes and ask the same dumb questions.

Sadly, programming is stuck in an endless loop.

Started with very basic programming with Telmac computer;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telmac_1800

It was assembled and was first computer my uncle had, which he gave to me when he got his first PC. Telmac got later replaced in our house with C64 when my big brother purchased one after carrying mail for few summers. With C64 I started to understand more about how computer memory works, so "converting" coordinates into memory addresses started the learning process that eventually led me to become a programmer.

dell_jockey wrote:TI-57 programmable calculator ('coz I couldn't afford a TI59... ), sometime mid-1970-ies.

Is there a PureBasic 'Over Forty' Club somewhere?

Yes, it's called the forum! I don't the the three guys who aren't over 40 mind watching in...

The ironic thing is that Fred said PB was designed for beginners, but ONLY ONE PERSON on this thread started with PB. A high percentage of us started with 6502 basic, and a few jumped at C (or similar) and landed on PB.

Another ironic thing is that the OP lists in the poll some 6502-era systems, but not the most common ones.

Tenaja wrote:Another ironic thing is that the OP lists in the poll some 6502-era systems, but not the most common ones.

The poll didn't list the IBM 7094 either. This was the computer I used to run my first FORTRAN program. I always wanted one of these.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhib ... P7094.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41U78QP8nBk

Now I have a desktop system many times more powerful, and with PB I can make it sing.

Vic 20 1982, Here is a funny story: A freind of mine built his own Microbee with the Z80 processor, and we decided to compare his Z80 against the 6502 in the Vic 20, I think it was the sieve test to 1000, and the Vic 20 did it in about 14 minutes, the Microbee was still going long after 1 hour, and he got shitty and turned off his computer, so we never did see how long it would have taken, I was teasing him for ages, that was when computing was fun.

@electrochrisso,
Your story reminded me of them old days. As I mentioned in my last post I had a bit of a mentor back in those days & 1 of the main things I did with him (mostly him....) was to take a Dick Smith system 80 computer which was a rebadged TRS80 machine, gut it & redesign an interface for it including building of our own PCB's, then set up to decode alarm system communications in 1400Khz - (I think..) decadic format & write software to use this as an alarm receiver. It was the 1st permanent alarm receiver with the company I was doing my apprenticship with back then which was looking after around 200 clients at the time.
The computer; http://www.thepcmuseum.com/dicksmith/Sy ... efault.htm

In an after-school computer programming club hosted by a local science center on their Honeywell main frame. This was in '71 while I was in 7th grade.

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A - way back in '81 I believe ...

Well, back when I seriously started (around 2000) I was testing out the Pascal language. Not too much longer after that, I came across PureBasic. While I did keep trying out various languages at the beginning, I pretty much new PureBasic was going to be it.

BorisTheOld wrote:Those of you who are not old haven't missed anything. Programming is essentially the same as it was 50 years ago. Programs are still buggy and poorly documented, and programmers still make the same stupid mistakes and ask the same dumb questions.

Sadly, programming is stuck in an endless loop.

Hehe, that is funny, and so true

I started in the 90's, writing text-based "games" in BASIC on the IBM PS/2. Eventually I moved to Turbo Pascal in high school and then C in college (none of which I use today, lol). My main language is PHP / MySQL these days, and I just recently got interested in PureBasic ... so I guess I'm going back to my roots

I actually wrote my very first programs on a C64. But to be honest I just copied (typed it off o the pages) it from a magazine.
It really started in school - a school with programming focus.

Chronologically:
Pascal, C, 370 Assembler, Fortran, PL1, C++, Stamp Basic, Rexx, Javascript, Visual Basic, Java, Purebasic, Darkbasic, X86 Asm, Clite, Delphi.

Hope I didnt miss something

Cheers Didel

Snocrash wrote:

BorisTheOld wrote:Those of you who are not old haven't missed anything. Programming is essentially the same as it was 50 years ago. Programs are still buggy and poorly documented, and programmers still make the same stupid mistakes and ask the same dumb questions.

Sadly, programming is stuck in an endless loop.

Hehe, that is funny, and so true

I started in the 90's, writing text-based "games" in BASIC on the IBM PS/2. Eventually I moved to Turbo Pascal in high school and then C in college (none of which I use today, lol). My main language is PHP / MySQL these days, and I just recently got interested in PureBasic ... so I guess I'm going back to my roots

Somewhat yes. But it's much easier to edit code now. My grandma use to have to use the Fortran punch cards. One error and you have to retype everything. I'm not sure there would be very many programmers today if that was still the case.

J. Baker wrote:My grandma use to have to use the Fortran punch cards. One error and you have to retype everything.

Actually, it wasn't quite that bad. Each line of source code was punched on a single card, so a coding error only required one card to be re-punched. The tedious part of programming was hand-writing the program onto pre-printed coding sheets, that were then transcribed by keypunch operators onto punched cards.

Two true stories about punched cards from my mainframe days:

The first from my time as the IBM guru at Sears (the department store) Head Office in Toronto. A newly hired keypunch operator, anxious to please, "corrected" the spelling on one day's production of Assembler coding sheets. The following morning, after the overnight compiler run, each of the programmers was faced with a huge compiler printout that needed "debugging".

The second involved an accountant - an over-the-counter customer at a service bureau I worked at. All his programs and data were on punched cards, which he stored in boxes in the trunk of his car. One unfortunate day he was rear-ended, and his entire "computer department" exploded into a cloud of punched cards that rained down over the freeway. Amazingly, within a couple of weeks he had restored his card decks, and went back to driving them around in his car.

I just bought a PB compiled a few days ago to get back into programing. Nice to see a lot of you have a history simular to mine.
My first delve into programming was on BASIC punch cards at ASU in Jonesboro. The college had a one day siminar that let 3 lucky students attend for a day. I was lucky to be drawn at my school from a business class.

After I graduated from HS I went in the military and found someone selling an Atari 800 complete with one floppy drive and all available options install you could get. 48K ram. Loved telling the C64 guys off when they bragged they had more ram than me by asking them how much programming room they had after dos was loaded and they were ready to start. I had about 200 bytes more than they did. LOL

I later bought an Amiga 1000 and had to get use to not using line numbers. Got tired of programming and let the PC evloution roll on. When visual basic came out I downloaded the free version and messed around and hated it. You never got just one exe file to run. You got all the other crap with it and it was not easy to use coming from a dos background. I found PB a week or so ago and downloaded the demo and messed around for a few hours and then bought the full version and I'm now learning and don't see the learning curve is going to be to hard for me. It will take a while to learn the detail in's and out's of what creates faster running code but I shall have fun again doing programs again.

Welcome to PB ChuckLayton - once you get the hang if it, you are going to enjoy using PB, it is superb.