How old did you start programming?
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Just wondering: how old were you when you start programming? maybe had your first computer? - 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
I got interested in it a the age of 13. 386, 4mb Ram, QBasic (messed around with the code in Nibbles and Gorrilas..hehe). I also worked a bit in Edlin (batch/menu language for dos... 3.x i think). I officially started when I went to go study it @ 18years old. One thing i love about programming... the only thing that limits you is your imagination. Anything is possible... Anything! Happy Coding SheepYNesS :wtf: Let's face the obvious: yesterday we were nerds, today we're the cognitive elite. Let's conquer. (Chester G Edwards)
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Just wondering: how old were you when you start programming? maybe had your first computer? - 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
I was 27, on an IBM 360/67, using ALGOLW and cards. There were no such things as personal computers then. There were some minis (PDP-x) made by Control Data (?). A couple of years after the 360/67 was installed, we decided we needed more memory (it had 356K). We couldn't afford IBM's prices, and shopped around a little bit. We eventually found a 256K memory box that used TRANSISTORS, of all things, for memory. It was housed in a 3 foot square by 4 or 5 foot high box (perforated metal for cooling, and had to be cooled by the air conditioning used for the mainframe. It cost $250,000 -- one dollar per byte. IBM was not pleased, but we had no trouble with the box. I do remember a desktop something or other made by IBM. You could program in APL or Basic, depending on some module you put in the computer. I think it had 8K of RAM, and no permanant storage, though you could get an extra tape drive to store programs on. This was in the mid-70s I think, about 8 years into my programming career. I bought one of the original IBM PCs in 1982 or 1983: 128K RAM, two 5.5" floppy drives, and an 8086 chip. I also got an Epson dot matrix printer which accepted 17" wide computer paper. The total cost was $5,500. I have never paid anywhere near that price for a computer, monitor, and printer since. The 128K RAM had been achieved by soldering extra RAM chips piggy-back onto the existing RAM chips. I guess there was an extra hole somewhere for the extra bus address wire that one of the chip wires got soldered in to. I spend hours on that machine, writing compilers mostly. A couple of years later we got IBM XTs at work. They had 10MB hard drives on them (I think). They hard drives were rumored to be VERY fragile. Sneezing on them could cause them to stop working. It turned out that it was the controller chip that was faulty. Occasionally the clock would change frequencies for a few milliseconds, and if you were writing to the drive, you instantly created something that could not be read, and the unit generated a fault. I think it took me 6 months to fill up the hard drive. Somewhere around that time Apple introduced the Lisa computer, which looked really neat. It just didn't have any application software on it, nor was any available. They modelled the screen design on work done by Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, which Stanford graduates (like me) were familiar with. The Lisa was a demo unit that our engineering group was lent for a few weeks. I don't know of anyone who ever bought one. But then the Mac came out ... Today I use a D
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Started at 14 using a home micro branded "Laser ..." something that run a BASIC v1.1 version. It had no storage medium, connected on the TV and had 32KB ram. It's speed must have been lower than 50KHz. Later i got my first XT Desktop which had two 5.25" floppy drives, 14" monitor, CGA (4 color 320x200), 512KB ram, NEC-V20 CPU and tripple speed configuration (changeable by Alt+Ctrl+1/2/3) at 4.77, 8 and 10MHz. Up to this moment (I'm 34), I still try to figure out if there was any app/game that runned too fast at 10MHz and would require a slowdown at 4.77 ??????:laugh:
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Just wondering: how old were you when you start programming? maybe had your first computer? - 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
Lol, i was also 12 when i had my VIC20 and on my 14 th i had a Commodore 64.. writing basic, peeking and pooking was my live... :-) greetz.. Kurt
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I got started when I was 20 in the service, didn't have Personal Computers back then. Only mainframes. Carc punches and readers, and tape. Using CoBOL and FORTRAN. Still making a pretty good living at coding. However, I can say I have put more than 20 applications into production, i.e., out the developer door where the "owner/client" could sell it to someone for usage and make a profit. I found that a lot of younger coders now-a-days are smart, got their certificates, etc. and they know their subject matter, but it seems like that once they have identified the saddle, bridal, and horse, they don't know how it all goes together so they can ride the horse, so to speak. I guess and more important question is how many actual out the door to be sold applications have you done and are you still doing it?
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Just wondering: how old were you when you start programming? maybe had your first computer? - 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
I started programming calculators back in the mid 70's when at Georgia Tech. First programming course was EE1010 - a FORTRAN course using the IBM 026 Key Punch coding for a Cyber-74 Mainframe. First computer I owned was a Timex/Sinclair 1000 (around 1979 or so) Bought original IBM PC (4.77Mhz, 1 360K Floppy Drive, 64K on motherboard) - Amdek Color II (CGA) monitor. Wrote a lot of code on that beast. Eventually put a 10MB Rodime hard drive in it. Man were those the days! -CB :)
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Started at 14 using a home micro branded "Laser ..." something that run a BASIC v1.1 version. It had no storage medium, connected on the TV and had 32KB ram. It's speed must have been lower than 50KHz. Later i got my first XT Desktop which had two 5.25" floppy drives, 14" monitor, CGA (4 color 320x200), 512KB ram, NEC-V20 CPU and tripple speed configuration (changeable by Alt+Ctrl+1/2/3) at 4.77, 8 and 10MHz. Up to this moment (I'm 34), I still try to figure out if there was any app/game that runned too fast at 10MHz and would require a slowdown at 4.77 ??????:laugh:
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Just wondering: how old were you when you start programming? maybe had your first computer? - 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
- High School Freshman (1975) - No PCs available as far as I knew - Mainframe: with teletype stations (3 of them in the room) - Language: some sort of basic - Anyone remember this? 10 REM First Program 20 Print "Hello world?" 30 END - Better get that line right the first time or you would see: "Syntax error" - And the results were displayed on that ugly green bar paper. Am I alone in this memory?
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Just wondering: how old were you when you start programming? maybe had your first computer? - 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
16 years old, using VBA in excel, my first line of code: x = shell("winfile.exe") All to get Duke Nukem 3D working on the library 486 running 3.11, can't remember what version of Excel it was. Then some serious time spent in config.sys and autoexec.bat just to get the CD rom working, MSCDEX anybody? But then I moved onto VB3... feel the power.
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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.
I think I was 9 or 10 years old when I first programmed in Basic. I had then a 486, 40MHz, which I was overclocked to 66MHz, which was later again overclocked to 100MHz , 272MB HDD, 8MB RAM
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It's funny, the teaser on my CodeProject email said "Fourteen, on cards, using Fortran.", which is pretty much where I started on a IBM/1130 -- it had a big red button on it for a cold start. Also BASIC (that's real Dartmouth BASIC) on some timesharing system back in 1972 (I was actually 14). I got one of the first copies of what was called MiniUNIX direct from Bell Labs for a PDP-11/20 I worked on. We were happy to work on that because it had a Tektronix screen -- so we didn't have to use those noisy TTYs. My PDA has 2000 times more memory than that thing -- 32K of real core. Another happy memory: when DEC came out with RK05's so we could carry our 1-2MB home (payroll etc) -- it was about as big as 2 or 3 stacked pizzas. Steve
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Just wondering: how old were you when you start programming? maybe had your first computer? - 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
18 years old, in FOCAL using a TeleType connected to a DEC PDP-8. It handled 5 simulaneous users and had 8Kwords (12-bit). I then used BASIC on a DEC PDP-10 which I think had 160Kwords (36-bit this time). Then, very rapidly, Macro-10 (PDP-10 assembler), FORTRAN, ALGOL60, ALGOL68, Macro-8 (PDP-8 assembler), PL/1, Babbage (a high-level assembler for GEC 4000 computers) and IBM/360 assembly language. By then, I was 22. I bought my first computer when aged 32; it was an Amstrad PPC640 with 640K memory and no hard drive. I added a 40Mb drive later. Programmed it using Basic and Assembler. I'd have to think about how many different types of machine I've used and with which languages. The list included PDP-11, VAX series (from MicroVax to 8650), IBM/370, GEC 4000 and 6000, as well most IBM-PC variants (from 8086 on). For some time my favourite language was Perl, because of it's portability, but I haven't used it for a few months (although I did use it extensively last year to query an ancient Oracle database). I now program mainly in Visual Basic and Transact-SQL (2005 versions) and can still run rings around almost every other programmer I come across.
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hobbywise back in the seventies, 8080, z80, 6800, 6502... and my alltime favorite, the 2650 (anybody know what that was?) and all programming done in assembler. hog heaven if you ask me! and great fun too... squeezing all desired functionality in as few bytes as possible... save a byte, get a sixpack (remember?) professionally, macro-11 and fortran on pdp-11s under rt-11sj/fb/xm and rsx-11s/m. after that the pc and the subsequent demise of a great art/craft. remember this one? - Real programmers don't write specs -- Users should consider themselves lucky to get any programs at all and take what they get. - Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read. - Real programmers don't write application programs, they program right down on the bare metal. Application programming is for feebs who can't do systems programming. - Real programmers don't eat quiche. They eat twinkies, and szechevan food. - Real programmers programs never work right the first time. But if you throw them on the machine they can be patched into working in only a few 30-hours debugging sessions. - Real programmers don't write in Fortran. Fortran is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. Read the full article here: http://www.travelnotes.de/california/silicon/realprog.htm
I remember that... I also remember how it seemed so apt the first time I came across it after several overnight programming sessions. "Overnight" was normal because the turnaround time on the mainframe was better at night (a few minutes) when only the 'serious' programmers were queuing jobs to it! During the day, jobs could spend a couple of hours in the queue waiting to be run.
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Just wondering: how old were you when you start programming? maybe had your first computer? - 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
I was 12 and worked in Basic on the local university mainframe via a 300-baud modem with acoustic couplers. I then "graduated" at 13 to a TRS-80 model I with level I basic and 4K RAM and a 150 baud cassette drive at school. My parents got me a TRS-80 model I with level II (deluxe model) with a whopping 16K RAM and 300 baud cassette drive! I know that dates me. Now my Samsung i500 (Palm based phone) with 16MB of memory would run rings around that Model I and it's 2"x3"x3/4" and it can connect to the internet!
Andrew C. Eisenberg Nashville, TN, USA (a.k.a. Music City USA) (Yes Virginia, there are rock and roll stations in Nashville! :laugh:)
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Just wondering: how old were you when you start programming? maybe had your first computer? - 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
i was born in 1979 and coded my first program in 1990. Selim DURMUS System Administrator Middle East Technical Universty TURKEY selimdurmus@hotmail.com
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Just wondering: how old were you when you start programming? maybe had your first computer? - 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
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Just wondering: how old were you when you start programming? maybe had your first computer? - 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
I was 20, the year was 1966, the languages were autocoder and machine code. The memory technology was mercury delay line (you could see the bits flipping) and it had 8K thereof, its external i/o was paper tape (in and out). The mass storage was a drum about the size of an large industrial washing machine that I think held about 256K bytes. Ths manufacturer was Ferranti, the machine was called Sirius; I guess it was 2nd generation, if one regards Univac and Atlas a first generation. Next I got to use to a Burroughs system - using Algol, which is when I first started using semi-colons.