How old did you start programming?

[JHubSharp]

I was around 4 or 5 when I started poking with my dad's old C-64. Thought it was the coolest thing ever to "give" my sister a screen that repeated "Happy birthday" over and over until I hit the break button. I went to QBasic in my teens and HTML in high school. I didn't ever really get back into coding (other than the very occasional JavaScript) until college, though.

[sampyxis]

For me, 13 yrs old - Vic 20 / then a Commodore 64 - loved it - basic, machine language - wrote games. I also wrote a few articles for various magazines before I was 16 - it was a great time ;-)

[msimas73]

I was 13 years old when I got a MSX 8 bit computer for Christmas (64kb of RAM with a cassette tape player, all hooked up to a TV - these were very popular in Brazil at the time)). I also got an Apple IIe programming book (there were no books out for MSX yet :-)) and that's how it all started...

[Wasureru]

Rob Caldecott wrote:

I started about 13 I guess - first using BBC Basic at school and then on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

I started with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, now that i think time is passing really quickly... oh no! I'm getting old! Started at age of 10 but didn't learn much at that time :P but it was enough for me to nag my mom for a full year for her to give me a computer xD

[Lilith C]

I was relatively old by comparison, maybe 26. My first computer was an Altair 8800 that I assembled from a kit. I mostly did assembly language because basic or any other language I had available for it was unable to do graphics very well. Eventually I moved on to the C-128 where I did assembly language programming for the CP/M side. Lilith

[oldfrog]

I was 35. started with a heathkit h88. 128 k ram. casset tape drive for storage. Used asm until i could come up with the money to buy the basic casset. But I still don't know how to program. I just make it up as I go along. :-)

[BoredCoder]

Ernest Laurentin wrote:

cool! Same for me. BASIC got me hooked first.

You mean there are OTHER languages to program in? :-D

[robj98021]

I was 12, and had a Sinclair ZX81 with the 16K add on module. Nothing beats the speed and reliability of magnetic tape storage ;)

[TCHamilton]

How about FORTRAN IV on an IBM 360/85 then DEC 11/45 and 11/70's (networked!). Then on to PC's with HP 9845B with no drives - only cassette port, the IBM PC with 2 floppy drives and no HDD, the IBM PC/XT (using AboveBoard for the extra 128k then extra 360 to get up to 1Mb of RAM). In the early 80's programming in DBase II, R:Base 4000 and Supercalc, Visicalc, Lotus 1a, Symphony, Quattro Pro. Documented with WordStar, DisplayWrite, MultiMate and early WordPerfect. Finally on to Turbo C, Turbo Assembler Turbo Pascal (I miss Borland). Here we are with Office 2007, DOT.net and some tremendous tools - I've really enjoyed the ride so far. Life is really good. I wonder just where we'll be in the next 25 years:cool:

Tom Hamilton/Intel Folsom

[JLengi]

Yup, I started with the original 4.77 MHz IBM PC. No hard disk, just 5-inch floppies. First programming language: Basic. When we got a modem, it was a whopping 300 bps. (We bypassed the 110 bps acoustic couplers.) The comm software was written in basic. And FIDONET was probably more widely used than the Internet.

[Jeremy T Fuller]

I was actually 8 years old, splitting my time between a TRS-80 and an Intel 8086 (4.77 Mhz) using, like everyone else, BASIC on both systems. Boy things have changed since then.

[CodeAddiction]

As probably many did, I screwed around with QBASIC and DOS command "programs" when I was really young. Then, when I was around 14 or so, we got a computer with Windows 95 on it. I think I really started programming shortly after that, like the summer of '96 when school was out and I was at home, bored, Windows 95 was new, the internet was begining to boom, and I was screwing around with AOL. I would see people use programs in it to automate things in AOL (room busters, punters, mass mailers, etc). I had no idea that one program could control another like that and it really sparked my interest as to how it could do that. Looking into it further really started my interest in programming. Learning about windows messaging and the API routines that were being used by simple Visual Basic applications to do all that.

[ednrgc]

Atari 800XL, using BasicXL. Learned the machine in and out, and started programming games.

[tlw1145]

Bunch of children! Digital Equipment Corporation PDP 11/40 / Assembler - had 64 kB memory and 128 kb (yes Bytes) hard drive. and IBM 360 / Fortran and others (1973)

[Private_Void]

I started programming at 6 on a commadore 64. I was so young I think it was BASIC , but the syntax (barely can remember) was something like, FOR I=1 TO 5 PRINT I NEXT -> 1 2 3 4 5.

[maxblitz]

I was 17. My father hired me to write a Basic program to help him chart commodity prices. It was an IBM PC XT (I believe). Basic had line numbers and was not yet structured. I think the CPU was a smokin' hot 4 MHZ and the disk drive held a whopping "10 million pieces of information!" (bytes). -- Mark W:omg:

[Dan Neely]

I started with a trash80-color at around the same age. Didn't really go beyond ascii art generation until 5 or 6 years later in highschool with turbopascal.

-- Rules of thumb should not be taken for the whole hand.

[kurious]

1980: I was 7, programming in Advanced Basic (basica on the PC). Moved on to Pascal, then C and x86 ASM, then Java, Bash, Perl and now Python. I still work heavily with Python, Java, C, and ASM. Matthew Carpenter

[destynova]

Ernest Laurentin wrote:

- I started programming when I was 12yrs (w/ VIC-20 and commodore 64)(I still feel young though!) - Programming language: Basic, then..Assembler for Commodore 64

Hey, I started on a C64 too, when I was 8 or 9 - only with Basic though. Sure it was right there as soon as you booted the thing up. What an awful implementation it was, though... a slow, unresponsive interface, hardly any language flexibility, and weren't variable names only differentiated by the first two characters? Anyway, I didn't get too far with that. Not until I got an Atari ST a few years later and got into GFA Basic at some point - even by today's standards quote a nice form, I think. And a really graceful interpreter interface! Then I dabbled a little in C (Sozobon C, the PD compiler... fun) and 68k assembly and kinda stayed around that level until I went to college some years later and started with Java and C++. Fun times!

[andyb46]

April 1976 Fortran on an ICL 3100 using a teletype keyboard with paper feeding through. Ebarrassed when writing a do while loop without incrementing the loop variable causing infinite loop, took three full pages before control c interrupted loop.