The First Program You Ever Wrote
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I used to copy Basic programs out of magazines with my dad into an Acorn Electron (evil twin of the BBC Basic). This was circa 1985. Those things were thousands of lines long with no debugger - if it didnt run it was a case of scanning through line for line to try to spot the typo. Occasionaly the magazine itself would contain a typo - those were the REALLY fun ones.
Ya I started with those as well , The mags I used where called 'INPUT' and you could be certain that if he program was more than 5 lines long, it wouldn't work. Me and my brother would spend hours typing them in on the ZX spectrum (not easy as half rubber keys had rubbed off from playing games) to find they wouldn't work. Then spend ages trying to find a typo. Only to find out in another 5 issues time that yes they had got it wrong and they published some 'errata' to correct the program. :mad: the errata corrections never worked either though!! grrrrrrr was a frustrating time, and hasn't got that much better over the years!!
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just thinking back between to the first time, and the very first program ever that i ever "wrote" was a DOS "application" [yes, it was called an application] that had to calculate tax [@ 14%]on any price you input. ANY price. ;P > Enter price: 10.00 Tax = 1.14 Total Price = 11.40 and it was sooo cool! nevermind it took me the best of three hours to write with borland c++ :D [and i copied half of it anyway cos i just didn't get what all the ;'s were doing there] the journey from that day to now... well, let's just say things are a little different- but programming still remains sooo cool. anyhoooo.. i was wondering just where/how did most programmers start out with their first ever "application"?
:: have the courage to use your own reason
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just thinking back between to the first time, and the very first program ever that i ever "wrote" was a DOS "application" [yes, it was called an application] that had to calculate tax [@ 14%]on any price you input. ANY price. ;P > Enter price: 10.00 Tax = 1.14 Total Price = 11.40 and it was sooo cool! nevermind it took me the best of three hours to write with borland c++ :D [and i copied half of it anyway cos i just didn't get what all the ;'s were doing there] the journey from that day to now... well, let's just say things are a little different- but programming still remains sooo cool. anyhoooo.. i was wondering just where/how did most programmers start out with their first ever "application"?
:: have the courage to use your own reason
On the Tandy TRS80 my dad recovered from a skip when his University was having a clearout - I think it was something along the lines of: 10 PRINT "HELLO RICHARD" 20 GOTO 10 Then (with lots of help from my Dad) we made some kind of snow program, with white asterisks falling down the screen. The TRS80 was incredibly limited to what you could actually do - it had no graphics, just upper case characters and punctuation.
-- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
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My first program was a QBASIC program which played the indian national antheme. ( the secret is that i copied it from somewhere and just runned it ) But what a feeling that time ! I was on the moon when it completed successfully !!:-D
"A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street." -- Doug Linder
Anant Y. Kulkarni
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Hmm, I don't really remember.. But, I got a ZX81 back in 1981 ;-) I still remember when I unpacked it and looked at the keyboard, and wondered about what all that "run", "goto" and other stuff did. When I got it hooked up to my parents TV, I thought I could use it as a calculator, so when I wrote "10+10=" it should show the result. The ZX 81 always started every line with a Basic keyword which was hardcoded to different keys on the keyboard so you didn't have to write them yourself. I pressed the key for "print" without knowing what it was supposed to do, and wrote "10+10=" and nothing happened. Hmmm :confused: Then I deleted the "=" and pressed enter, and huh! The TV actually showed "20" on the next line. After that I started to read the manual and a looong adventure into programming started. I know, not my first program, but related I think :)
- Anders My new photo website[^]
Anders Molin wrote:
ut, I got a ZX81 back in 1981 ;) I still remember when I unpacked it and looked at the keyboard, and wondered about what all that "run", "goto" and other stuff did.
Recently I used a ZX81 emulator coded in JavaScript (:omg:) and I was shocked that I still remember most of those keyboard commands (on the "K" cursor state): "J" for "LOAD", "L" for "LET", and so on.
I don't see dead pixels anymore... Yes, even I am blogging now!
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just thinking back between to the first time, and the very first program ever that i ever "wrote" was a DOS "application" [yes, it was called an application] that had to calculate tax [@ 14%]on any price you input. ANY price. ;P > Enter price: 10.00 Tax = 1.14 Total Price = 11.40 and it was sooo cool! nevermind it took me the best of three hours to write with borland c++ :D [and i copied half of it anyway cos i just didn't get what all the ;'s were doing there] the journey from that day to now... well, let's just say things are a little different- but programming still remains sooo cool. anyhoooo.. i was wondering just where/how did most programmers start out with their first ever "application"?
:: have the courage to use your own reason
The first program I wrote that I remember was a text-based (teletype actually) Star Trek game on a PDP-11. 10x10 grid, your ship, phasers, photons, Romulan Neutral Zone, a couple planets to investigate, a space station to dock with. You basically had to wipe out the Romulans and save the planets, but some of them lurked hidden behind the neutral zone and you had to go hunt them down. Every turn reprinted the grid with updated positions and stats like shields, energy, etc. Let's see, that was in 8th grade, I think, over 30 years ago. Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh Smith -
just thinking back between to the first time, and the very first program ever that i ever "wrote" was a DOS "application" [yes, it was called an application] that had to calculate tax [@ 14%]on any price you input. ANY price. ;P > Enter price: 10.00 Tax = 1.14 Total Price = 11.40 and it was sooo cool! nevermind it took me the best of three hours to write with borland c++ :D [and i copied half of it anyway cos i just didn't get what all the ;'s were doing there] the journey from that day to now... well, let's just say things are a little different- but programming still remains sooo cool. anyhoooo.. i was wondering just where/how did most programmers start out with their first ever "application"?
:: have the courage to use your own reason
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on the good ole spectrum 48k 10 Print "Hello World" 20 Goto 10 think thats the right syntax! :rolleyes:
I'm sure I used to do something like PRINT "Hello ", or something else at the end of the line which resulted in the output going all over the screen rather than a column down the left. If I had more time, I put a loop in there and changed the foreground and background colours too!
Regards, Ray
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just thinking back between to the first time, and the very first program ever that i ever "wrote" was a DOS "application" [yes, it was called an application] that had to calculate tax [@ 14%]on any price you input. ANY price. ;P > Enter price: 10.00 Tax = 1.14 Total Price = 11.40 and it was sooo cool! nevermind it took me the best of three hours to write with borland c++ :D [and i copied half of it anyway cos i just didn't get what all the ;'s were doing there] the journey from that day to now... well, let's just say things are a little different- but programming still remains sooo cool. anyhoooo.. i was wondering just where/how did most programmers start out with their first ever "application"?
:: have the courage to use your own reason
it was probably 10 PRINT "Yay "; 20 Goto 10 in BASIC, on a Commodore PET.
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The first program I wrote that I remember was a text-based (teletype actually) Star Trek game on a PDP-11. 10x10 grid, your ship, phasers, photons, Romulan Neutral Zone, a couple planets to investigate, a space station to dock with. You basically had to wipe out the Romulans and save the planets, but some of them lurked hidden behind the neutral zone and you had to go hunt them down. Every turn reprinted the grid with updated positions and stats like shields, energy, etc. Let's see, that was in 8th grade, I think, over 30 years ago. Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh Smith -
it was probably 10 PRINT "Yay "; 20 Goto 10 in BASIC, on a Commodore PET.
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I'm sure I used to do something like PRINT "Hello ", or something else at the end of the line which resulted in the output going all over the screen rather than a column down the left. If I had more time, I put a loop in there and changed the foreground and background colours too!
Regards, Ray
Yep, something with POKE 53280,X and POKE 53281,X on the C64 if I recall correct. ;)
Arjan
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just thinking back between to the first time, and the very first program ever that i ever "wrote" was a DOS "application" [yes, it was called an application] that had to calculate tax [@ 14%]on any price you input. ANY price. ;P > Enter price: 10.00 Tax = 1.14 Total Price = 11.40 and it was sooo cool! nevermind it took me the best of three hours to write with borland c++ :D [and i copied half of it anyway cos i just didn't get what all the ;'s were doing there] the journey from that day to now... well, let's just say things are a little different- but programming still remains sooo cool. anyhoooo.. i was wondering just where/how did most programmers start out with their first ever "application"?
:: have the courage to use your own reason
My first 'application' was written on mark sense cards, in a pseudo-language... and I don't remember the name of it... (circa... 1980) In college (1982), we were asked to write an application in this 'language' that read in a deck of cards (number unknown) and print them in reverse order... the only way to complete the application was to have the program modify itself to change the index operator from 'add 1' to 'subtract 1'... I miss applications that can modify themselves... Tim
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just thinking back between to the first time, and the very first program ever that i ever "wrote" was a DOS "application" [yes, it was called an application] that had to calculate tax [@ 14%]on any price you input. ANY price. ;P > Enter price: 10.00 Tax = 1.14 Total Price = 11.40 and it was sooo cool! nevermind it took me the best of three hours to write with borland c++ :D [and i copied half of it anyway cos i just didn't get what all the ;'s were doing there] the journey from that day to now... well, let's just say things are a little different- but programming still remains sooo cool. anyhoooo.. i was wondering just where/how did most programmers start out with their first ever "application"?
:: have the courage to use your own reason
My first wasn't really an application; today we'd call it a driver. My first computer didn't have any I/O, so I designed and built an interface card. Then I needed something to allow it to work, so I had to write the code to make the computer check it periodically for the presence of a data byte and do something with the data.
"...a photo album is like Life, but flat and stuck to pages." - Shog9
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On the Tandy TRS80 my dad recovered from a skip when his University was having a clearout - I think it was something along the lines of: 10 PRINT "HELLO RICHARD" 20 GOTO 10 Then (with lots of help from my Dad) we made some kind of snow program, with white asterisks falling down the screen. The TRS80 was incredibly limited to what you could actually do - it had no graphics, just upper case characters and punctuation.
-- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
From what I remember, the TRS-80 had a very crude form of "graphics". While it really always stayed in text mode, 64 characters in the character set were special 3 high by 2 wide pixel characters. This allowed setting monochrome pixels on the screen (as long as they didn't overlap with where you wanted to put text). I think the text display was 80 by 24, which allowed for an effective graphics resolution of 160 by 72. I remember an early game called 'Android Nim' which used the crude graphics to display animation of Android characters which were destroyed as part of playing the game. The game itself was very simple, but it was fun to see animation on a TRS-80. I think that the source was printed in some magazine of the time (the late 70's). At the time, I had an Exidy Sorceror computer (another Z-80 based computer which also had Basic available). It didn't have the TRS-80 character set for graphics, but it did have a programmable character set (you could poke data into the character set for the top 128 characters). I ported a number of TRS-80 games to the Exidy (including Android Nim) by setting up the programmable characters with a character set similar to the TRS-80.
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just thinking back between to the first time, and the very first program ever that i ever "wrote" was a DOS "application" [yes, it was called an application] that had to calculate tax [@ 14%]on any price you input. ANY price. ;P > Enter price: 10.00 Tax = 1.14 Total Price = 11.40 and it was sooo cool! nevermind it took me the best of three hours to write with borland c++ :D [and i copied half of it anyway cos i just didn't get what all the ;'s were doing there] the journey from that day to now... well, let's just say things are a little different- but programming still remains sooo cool. anyhoooo.. i was wondering just where/how did most programmers start out with their first ever "application"?
:: have the courage to use your own reason
The first real (i.e. useful) program I wrote was at University. It was written in FORTRAN and processed data from a spectrometer for one of my projects. I forget the actual purpose of the project, but do remember finding programming more enjoyable than the physics I was meant to be doing! Even so, it took me 14 years to get around to doing more programming, when I finally embarked on the Computer Science course that led to my current career.
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just thinking back between to the first time, and the very first program ever that i ever "wrote" was a DOS "application" [yes, it was called an application] that had to calculate tax [@ 14%]on any price you input. ANY price. ;P > Enter price: 10.00 Tax = 1.14 Total Price = 11.40 and it was sooo cool! nevermind it took me the best of three hours to write with borland c++ :D [and i copied half of it anyway cos i just didn't get what all the ;'s were doing there] the journey from that day to now... well, let's just say things are a little different- but programming still remains sooo cool. anyhoooo.. i was wondering just where/how did most programmers start out with their first ever "application"?
:: have the courage to use your own reason
homegrown wrote:
i was wondering just where/how did most programmers start out with their first ever "application"?
depends on how you define my first application. I modified a text only game on a TRS-80 Model I that was bombing Russia (cold war). I added graphics (radar screen) so that you could see targets, enemies, and approaching missiles trying to take you out. My first program written from the ground up was a polar coordinate mapping program of spider webs, choose center of screen, weave web until reaches a wall.... It was just learning the graphics system of my new computer I bought for myself in High School.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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I'm sure I used to do something like PRINT "Hello ", or something else at the end of the line which resulted in the output going all over the screen rather than a column down the left. If I had more time, I put a loop in there and changed the foreground and background colours too!
Regards, Ray
Ahh yes, its all coming back to me. INK and PAPER. sooo self explanatory!!! so now we can have something a bit more colourful like this:
10 RANDOMIZE 1 20 CLS 30 PAPER INT (RND*7) : INK INT(RND*7) 40 PRINT "MY brother smells "; 45 POKE 23692,255 50 GOTO 30I changed the text to something I would have more likely output at the tender age of 8 or 9 when I got my speccy! ok so I admit I can't remember my ZX spectrum BASIC this well. I found a manual hingy on the web.... http://www.1000bit.net/support/manuali/zxspectrum/contents.htm[^] -
homegrown wrote:
i was wondering just where/how did most programmers start out with their first ever "application"?
depends on how you define my first application. I modified a text only game on a TRS-80 Model I that was bombing Russia (cold war). I added graphics (radar screen) so that you could see targets, enemies, and approaching missiles trying to take you out. My first program written from the ground up was a polar coordinate mapping program of spider webs, choose center of screen, weave web until reaches a wall.... It was just learning the graphics system of my new computer I bought for myself in High School.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
Jeffry J. Brickley wrote:
depends on how you define my first application.
your first application would be any software program that was designed to perform a specific task. i;m not sure if the definition cateres for quality though [ie. did it actually work and how well? :)] nonetheless, for a first app... not bad
:: have the courage to use your own reason
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just thinking back between to the first time, and the very first program ever that i ever "wrote" was a DOS "application" [yes, it was called an application] that had to calculate tax [@ 14%]on any price you input. ANY price. ;P > Enter price: 10.00 Tax = 1.14 Total Price = 11.40 and it was sooo cool! nevermind it took me the best of three hours to write with borland c++ :D [and i copied half of it anyway cos i just didn't get what all the ;'s were doing there] the journey from that day to now... well, let's just say things are a little different- but programming still remains sooo cool. anyhoooo.. i was wondering just where/how did most programmers start out with their first ever "application"?
:: have the courage to use your own reason
homegrown wrote:
and the very first program ever that i ever "wrote" was a DOS "application" [yes, it was called an application] that had to calculate tax [@ 14%]on any price you input. ANY price.
I had to write the EXACT same program. Except I had to do it in Pascal (back in '95) :~ I still have it somewhere I think... It didn't have any procedures or functions. It was just one loooong block of code. Well, it seemed long back then it's probably only a few lines but I remember I had to (Gasp) scroll down to get to the bottom of the code.
Capital Punishment means never having to say "you again?" As easy as 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169