What was your first experience in computer programmimg?

[TGB1718]

I think the company that made them was called PPM, their system was 68000 based

[zzip]

9 hours ago, Kenshi said:

(I learned the 6502 in college, so I just had to learn the other hardware and OS.)

I wish they taught us on 6502 in college, I'd have been ahead of the game.   Instead they taught us 8088 Assembly and I hated it! (damn memory segmentation...)

[TGB1718]

20 minutes ago, zzip said:

I wish they taught us on 6502 in college, I'd have been ahead of the game.   Instead they taught us 8088 Assembly and I hated it! (damn memory segmentation...)

When I went to college, we were taught on a 6502 KIM board, but I already had my 800 with Assembler Editor Cart

so needless to say I got a distinction in that subject

 

[+5-11under]

For me: 6800 in 1st year college using some training kit, then that dang 8088 on a PC (we pretty much needed to buy a PC at that point - the rich kids bought 286es for a couple of grand, and some bought used 8088 machines for about a grand - mine was a Turbo 8 MHz AT with 20 or 30 MB HD, 5.25" floppy, amber monitor, and monochrome graphics card).

 

[Kenshi]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

I wish they taught us on 6502 in college, I'd have been ahead of the game.   Instead they taught us 8088 Assembly and I hated it! (damn memory segmentation...)

 

We programmed in machine language on three or four processors in that microprocessors class. I specifically remember the 6502 was first and took up most of the class, then the Z80, and the 68000. There may have been an Intel processor too. This was in 2000 or 2001, so these processors were pretty antiquated by that point. They made me take a Windows 3.1 class which I fortunately tested out of, but then the college dropped that class and added a Windows 2000 class. There were a few classes I wondered why I was having to learn about such ancient stuff, but I enjoyed the microprocessors class.

 

1 hour ago, TGB1718 said:

When I went to college, we were taught on a 6502 KIM board, but I already had my 800 with Assembler Editor Cart

so needless to say I got a distinction in that subject

 

 

We had something along those lines. It was some kind of development board, but it had a case; it wasn't just a bare circuit board. You had to type in your code in hex and you could single-step it and watch the contents of the registers on the LED displays. It was pretty cool. I had done assembly programming on the x86 by that point, so it wasn't hard to pick up.

[in_denial]

Looks like I am just part of the herd here!  I started in 1980 when I discovered our school had a Research Machines 380Z (Z80, CP/M, two floppies) which had a superb software monitor/front panel,  but I mostly learned BASIC on that.  There were a couple of SWTPC 6800, with terminals attached, running Flex OS, and much preferred learning 6800 assembler to the Z80.  My dad got an Apple ][ and learned VisiCalc and some early databases, whilst I persuaded him to get a language card and UCSD Pascal, which I taught myself.

 Finally got my own computer around 1983, an Atari 400 -- the price had dropped from £400 to £200, and I loved programming display lists and PM graphics -- plus the OS seemed much more grown-up the the Apple ][ monitor ROM.  Then it was off to Uni for a Computer Science degree, with Vaxen running BSD Unix, C, FORTRAN, databases etc.

 Now I'm working in the Java/Docker/Kubernetes ecosystem, and have a hankering for the good old days,  and to see if I can get a newly-acquire Atari 600XL+U1MB+FujiNet to allow me to re-learn Forth, Mac/65 Action! etc.

[+Gemintronic]

Probably the PET in junior high.  They had a C64 but saving was sketchy and I lost hours of work too many times.  The PET was reasonably fast to save and load from cassette.

[MrMaddog]

My first experience with BASIC programming was back in the early 80's when stores like K-mart had the demo kiosks of home computers like the TI-99/4A and sometimes they had a game cart, I just had to play video games on them.  But most of the time there wouldn't be a cart inserted so it only ran BASIC and no matter what I tried to type in I always get the dreaded SYNTAX ERROR message.  My mom seen me play around with these computers getting them to do something so she saved up extra money working a part time cleaning job to buy my a Tandy CoCo for Christmas.  It came with a big book that teaches how to use the computer, in a very user friendly manner, and she would sit with me helping me type in the example programs that do lots of cool stuff.

 

Eventually I would move on to an Atari 130XE where I refinded my BASIC skills with the aid of an Antic subscription and in college the ST where I took a course in Structured Programming in MS Basic.  I tested my code in ST Basic which at least was MS BASIC compatible before re-typing it on a VAX terminal.  And later on I'd learn COBOL, PASCAL and my favorite C/C++.

 

That's why I say that parents should encourage their children to learn computer skills even if they "play" games...

 

[+Stephen]

1 hour ago, in_denial said:

 Now I'm working in the Java/Docker/Kubernetes ecosystem, and have a hankering for the good old days,  and to see if I can get a newly-acquire Atari 600XL+U1MB+FujiNet to allow me to re-learn Forth, Mac/65 Action! etc.

 

16 minutes ago, MrMaddog said:

That's why I say that parents should encourage their children to learn computer skills even if they "play" games...

Agree with both sentiments.  There was a long period between getting my 1st Atari and actually getting a job as a coder, but I have been doing it fulltime for the past 16 years now.  In the C#.Net, T-SQL, MySQL, and AWS ecosystem.  But all the skills I learned from finding typos from type-in magazines, and understanding other people's code enough to fix it, modify it, etc. and most importantly how to code tightly and efficiently because of starting with 16kB of code helps me daily.  Even if, as was noted, the initial skillset was mostly about game coding, and all of my real jobs have been absolutely the polar opposite, large business and financial processing systems.

[sanny]

1981/1982 with my father's TI-59 programmable calculator. Previously he had had a HP-45 since the mid-70ies (both from his work) with which I sometimes did the school homework in my early grades. Most of the time he left the HP-45 in the office and didn't take it home, though 😞

When he brought the TI-59 (which I think he didn't use much, since it was most of the time at home) I thought "what should this be, 'programmable'"?

I've understood the benefit of programming then in 9th grade in school, when we learned about taking a square root with nested intervals. This method was scheduled in a test, so I programmed it on the TI-59. Programmable calculators were forbidden at that time, but the teacher didn't check....

The programming was fun, and in the test i just had to type R/S on the calculator and write down the numbers, while the other guys were busy typing long fractional numbers into their (non-programmable) calculators.

 

Then in 1983/1984 I took an optional course in "Informatik" where we learned BASIC with CBMs (I think like 3016 and 4032 or so). There someone with more experience said, that in order to write games you would have to use machine language instead of BASIC. That's why I've learned assembler (first 6502, then 8086 for the PC). So it happened that since 1990 I'm working as software developer....

Edited February 9, 2023 by sanny

[ClausB]

11 hours ago, sanny said:

TI-59 programmable calculator

Cool! The 59 was the second computer I owned. TI SR-56 was the first. The first 5 computers I programmed were:

Honeywell H200 in Fortran

Altair 8800a in BASIC

TI SR-56

CDC 6500 in Fortran

TI-59

Edited February 9, 2023 by ClausB

[AtariGeezer]

My first experiences with programming was in High School as a freshman, back in 1974 in the electronics classroom. We had a teletype terminal like this one that dialed into a DECsystem-10. That's where I got my first experience in BASIC.  I was quite amazed how easily it was to write programs on that. We spent many hours playing lunar lander, drag race, hunt the wumpus, tic-tac-toe, chess and other games. Now that was a great training computer

 

[+bob1200xl]

1964 - Fortran on an IBM mainframe.

 

Bob

 

[Rybags]

I never had much to do with Fortran.

We did a week or 2 of it at school, also Cobol but I missed that because I had the week off with the flu.

 

Sometime in the early 1990s I installed a new set of runtime libraries for Fortran.  I don't think any active dev was happening, it would have just been in aid of legacy applications.

[algato]

In 1982, I sold my Atari 2600 and all of my games to buy an Atari 400.  I had to figure out for myself how these things could play so many games on one device.  I picked up a book on Atari Basic and taught myself how to program.  I skipped everything in the book and went straight to graphics.  I remember plotting my first point on the screen and drawing my first line.  I continued editing from there and made a Tron style light cycle game.  Next, I wrote a lunar lander game, similar to the arcade Atari lunar lander game, using real physics equations.  Next a motorcycle jumping game using the same physics.  I was in Engineering school and found it faster to write several programs, rather than crunching numbers on my calculator.  I even got extra credit for printing out my programs and turning those in with my homework.  I wrote an animated Christmas card for my girlfriend.  I eventually wrote a program that manages Aurora AFX slot car races, turning on and off the power, counting laps, recording lap times, storing best lap times, and used the Alien VoiceBox as a voice to start and end the race, and also provide some basic instructions to the drivers.  I still use that same program today.     

[+Larry]

On 2/10/2023 at 2:57 PM, bob1200xl said:

1964 - Fortran on an IBM mainframe.

 

Bob

 

I think that's the earliest so far.  I didn't know that IBM had mainframes that early, but I was way off in my time frame.  They were introduced in 1944 according to this interesting article:

https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_intro.html

[ClausB]

On 2/9/2023 at 6:09 PM, ClausB said:

The first 5 computers I programmed were:

Honeywell H200 in Fortran

Altair 8800a in BASIC

TI SR-56

CDC 6500 in Fortran

TI-59

The 6th was my new Atari 400 with 8K and 410. I learned Atari BASIC and 6502 assembly.

[+Larry]

1 hour ago, ClausB said:

...TI SR-56

I had one of those in the mid-70's for work.  Unfortunately, it only lasted a couple of years before it died.  I think I paid about $90 for it.

[rdefabri]

Atari BASIC around 1980-1981 was my first programming experience.

 

Same time frame, my brother and I would type-in machine language games from ANALOG,so I developed some very limited knowledge, ultimately modifying game title screens to put my name or messages - nothing fancy (but I was probably 12 at the time, so it was neat).

 

My father was a phone company lifer, so I learned C/C++ around 1985 or so, but never did much with it.

 

Around 2000, I enrolled in a MS Software Engineering degree program, everything was full-on C/C++ on UNIX.

 

I was never much of a coder / programmer - my skills are rudimentary, and I don’t do it as a career.  However, I can grasp concepts and techniques, and hopefully in the near future I’ll complete an Atari 8-bit project (if time permits).

[Matej]

Logo as 5 years old. Latter Atari Basic I was developing magazine engine as 10 years old. And simple demos (demoscene) in TurboPascal 13 years old... And now just html and php.

[Ppyo]

I am not a formally trained programmer, having majored in Biology.

Around 1983 at work (Natl Univ of Mexico), on my own I learned to program in BASIC PLUS 2, on a DEC PDP-11-40. The fact that there was not enough availability for me of that timesharing machine made me get my own computer, a Timex Sinclair with 16K.

After much cussing due to the crappy membrane keyboard, I decided to buy an 800XL. On a trip to Washington DC, I got me a 1050 drive, and the rest is history. Later migrated to an Atari 520 ST where I was happy coding in GFA BASIC.

Eventually I moved on to a Pissy machine (486) with Windoze, but that did not last long, and I installed Linux on it, and that has been my OS of choice since then. On Linux I dabbled in Perl and a little Python. Lately I returned to my happy days of early computing and got the Timex 1500 (still trying to make it work), a working 800XL with U1MB, S-drive Max, and SIDE3, and a 1040STF with GoTek floppy emulator and UltraSATAN.

Pure bliss.

 

[mutterminder]

In 1977 I read about a new micro computer being introduced by Radio Shack called the TRS-80. For only $599 you could get a computer, a monitor, and a cassette deck for data storage. I read Creative Computing regularly, and believe me, this was the best deal you could find at that time for a fully functional micro computer. I saved my money, and bugged the guy at the local Radio Shack every week until he told me when they would be getting the TRS-80 in stock and put down $100 to reserve one.  Consequently, I was the first person to buy a TRS-80 from that Radio Shack, and I believe I was probably the first person in my little town to own a micro computer.

 

The TRS-80 came with a wonderful user manual that taught me how to program in BASIC.  I ended up typing every single program in that book, but I wanted more, so I purchased "BASIC Computer Games" by David H. Ahl, the editor of Creative Computing.  I did my best to translate as many of these programs into Level I BASIC and fit them into 4K of RAM.  Not all of them could be made to fit, but the endeavor taught me much about programming techniques.  By 1979 I had upgraded to Level II BASIC and 16K of RAM which I found to be incredibly more powerful.  That's also the year I started college.  In college my first programming class was in FORTRAN IV.  First year students had to buy a big box of punch cards on which to enter your programs.  You would have to wait your turn in the computer lab for access to the IBM punch card machines.  Once you had your stack of cards ready, you would take them (stacked in the proper order) to computing center.  There you could submit them to be read into the IBM 370, and later in the day (if you were lucky) or the next day, you could go back and pick up your stack of cards and the resulting printout.  If you were lucky, the program would produce the output you expected, but more than likely you would get a long printout with several pages of compiler errors.  What made it worse was that the compiler would try to correct common syntax mistakes, and replace them with what it thought you wanted.  More than likely, it would guess wrong and the correction would cause even more errors.

 

In later programing classes, I took WATFIV, and PL/C.  These were entered on a remote terminal, which was more conducive to interactive program debugging, though the programs were still entered in 80 column punched card format.

[+5-11under]

2 minutes ago, mutterminder said:

"BASIC Computer Games" by David H. Ahl, the editor of Creative Computing.

Awesome book. I still have mine. Not having a TRS-80, I learned a lot about "translating" programs from one platform to another. Fun pictures, too.

[zzip]

On 2/10/2023 at 6:41 PM, Rybags said:

I never had much to do with Fortran.

We did a week or 2 of it at school, also Cobol but I missed that because I had the week off with the flu.

I had to take a semester-long class on Cobol.   Even back (early 90s) it was considered outdated and students were wondering why we had to take a course in it.

 

It actually surprised me,  I thought it was kind of a fun language

[Tinman]

30 minutes ago, zzip said:

I had to take a semester-long class on Cobol.   Even back (early 90s) it was considered outdated and students were wondering why we had to take a course in it.

 

It actually surprised me,  I thought it was kind of a fun language

I took two semesters of COBOL in college. I loved it!  Especially how easy it is to read.

 

I later taught some programming and used it as an example of an easy to read language.  For example, in C (and similar languages) if you have a variable called X and want to increment it, you can use X++.  Nice and concise, but not so easy to read later.  BASIC is better, using X=X+1.  But COBOL is the best.  If you want to add 1 to X, the statement is ADD 1 TO X.  (Including the period!)