I started programming at age 13
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I was in school and my first project was making a stop sign that light red, yellow, green. I was using PC LOGO When did you start programming? And what was your first project?
My first stint with programming was with logo for learners in grade school. My first real programming was changing the parameters in QBasic Gorillas and Nibbles to make for more interesting effects. Then I convinced my H.S. C.S. teacher to let me write games instead of learn productivity software in my C.S. class in H.S. Then I dropped out of Advanced C.S. in H.S. when the teacher on the first day instructed us to open Mavis Beacon. In his defense he asked me why later and must have taken it to heart because he changed the curriculum and the class built a pinball machine instead.
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I was in school and my first project was making a stop sign that light red, yellow, green. I was using PC LOGO When did you start programming? And what was your first project?
Part of me becoming an electronics engineer was to build a Z80 board with 2K of RAM. We got the circuit board and a sack full of components and had to solder it together. The keyboard consisted of the numbers 0-9 and the letters A-F which means that we programmed in HEX code. First program was a traffic light control (it always seems to be...).
modified on Tuesday, September 9, 2008 8:52 AM
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I was in school and my first project was making a stop sign that light red, yellow, green. I was using PC LOGO When did you start programming? And what was your first project?
I believe it was 9 (and 1981) for me. I studied and turned a BASIC states and capitals game into a hangman game on a commodore vic20. The biggest part of this was understanding how the randomization routine worked and how to modify it for my purpose. I also remember using the fuzzy string match routine that allowed misspellings from that in several other projects.
John
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About the second question I ask in interviews is "When did you start programming?" and if I get back "Oh, in college" I know I'm in for a painful interview. Sometimes I am surprised but by in large people who choose programming as a career on entering college are not ready to programme (in the field I work in) when they leave college. They make good formal programmers for big corporates who need implementors but they don't make good free thinking programmers. (Clarification; we need all types. I'm just not hiring guys who are bound by what they were taught parrot fashion in college.)
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
Well said, Sir.
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I know which machine you mean - I had one while I was at Uni (mine was the turbocharged version with 1MB of RAM!). :-\ It was CP/M+, BTW. Fun system to learn on, aside from the mono monitor.
Anna :rose: Having a bad bug day? Tech Blog | Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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Ohhhh! You had breakfast, you lucky thing you. We had to get up before we went to sleep, eat roadkill for lunch, set our selves on fire to guide the planes into Heathrow before climbing into the jet engines to clean them with our tongues! You had luxury you did!
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
Roadkill? Luxury! We had a handful of warm gravel, had to walk uphill both ways to heathrow airport, and when we got home our dad would beat us to death with his belt! Godwins law states that an online discussion will eventually refer to the nazi's or hitler. Whats the law called where an online discussion will eventually refer to the 4 yorkshireman sketch?
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Roadkill? Luxury! We had a handful of warm gravel, had to walk uphill both ways to heathrow airport, and when we got home our dad would beat us to death with his belt! Godwins law states that an online discussion will eventually refer to the nazi's or hitler. Whats the law called where an online discussion will eventually refer to the 4 yorkshireman sketch?
Your dad had a belt? Luxury! Our dad beat us to death with Emily, the youngest of us! Then he'd call up the Germans and have them blitzkrieg our house just to make sure we stayed dead. Damned Nazis!
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
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Roadkill? Luxury! We had a handful of warm gravel, had to walk uphill both ways to heathrow airport, and when we got home our dad would beat us to death with his belt! Godwins law states that an online discussion will eventually refer to the nazi's or hitler. Whats the law called where an online discussion will eventually refer to the 4 yorkshireman sketch?
Recursive Pythonism?
------------------------------------ Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay. - Charles Dickens
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I used to mess around with Logo on my dads Amstrad cpw pcw. Big ugly thing with the disc drive mounted on the side of the (black and green) monitor. Was probably around 9-10ish. I then started exploring the OS (it was some variant of CP/M[^]) and messed around with the source code of a few of the games (in Basic I think, but I didn't know that at the time). It was around 11 where I really discovered it though on my schools BBC micro and a 'program your own space adventure games' book. I spent ages copying out the code, for it not to work and having to spend ages checking through the 50 line program for my mistakes. The first game I remember getting working was kind of a text only version of the classic gorillas[^] Later was given an Oric Atmos[^] which I continued with for a while.
Simon
modified on Tuesday, September 9, 2008 8:49 AM
Simon Stevens wrote:
Later was given an Oric Atmos[^] which I continued with for a while.
Har har! i can beat that. I started with an Oric-1[^]! Still gotit and it still works; as of last month when I sert it up and played a few games. 'The Hobbit' was the best commercial one, but I had a three line adventure game as well I found on one fo my tapes which was cool!
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done.
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About the second question I ask in interviews is "When did you start programming?" and if I get back "Oh, in college" I know I'm in for a painful interview. Sometimes I am surprised but by in large people who choose programming as a career on entering college are not ready to programme (in the field I work in) when they leave college. They make good formal programmers for big corporates who need implementors but they don't make good free thinking programmers. (Clarification; we need all types. I'm just not hiring guys who are bound by what they were taught parrot fashion in college.)
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
Yes you make a good point. But the programmers who start when they are young or before College tend to lack the social skills that are needed such as communication and leadership skills. I agree with your arguement though.I dont think I have a complete programmer's mind, I more stumbled across the career path I am heading on.
The answers posted by me are suggestions only and cannot be used in anyway against me.
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I was in school and my first project was making a stop sign that light red, yellow, green. I was using PC LOGO When did you start programming? And what was your first project?
Started on ZX80, then 81 then Speccy, then BBC, then Northstar, The RM 380Z, then IBM XT, Then AS400 then PC's. Still want to have an ORAC type of machine that I can just ell it what to do. First program was a calculator, first big program was an Etch a Sketch, First work program was a Build Cost analysis device for land purchasing.
------------------------------------ Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay. - Charles Dickens
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If I remember correctly I was about 15, and the program was an adventure game written in BASIC on an Apple III[^]. Within a few months I'd graduated to assembly language programming* (using a Z80 co-processor board), and the rest is (as they say) history. :) * There's still an assembly language queued print spooler I wrote for CP/M+ out there somewhere in the public domain.
Anna :rose: Having a bad bug day? Tech Blog | Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
Wow, you had an assembler - luxury! I was calculating byte codes for the Vic 20 (6502) then poking them into memory, waiting for Christmas to come to get that shiny Commodore Assembler cartridge! First real projects were a very simple word processor for the school PET 'cos we didn't have one and some software to allow the user to "program" lighting instructions for the Vic. It was an "IDE" written in basic for entering / editing and storing lighting commands as byte codes and a "runtime" in assembler to execute the codes and send signals to the port to connect with some fairly lethal hardware (I'm sure that somewhere along the line I'm owed a big royalty fee for the Java design!) We did manage to do a disco though running 7.5kW of lights, and nobody died. Off-topic: I've done some assembly on x86 (well x88 if we're being pedantic) processors (way back) but never on ones that had an operating system and am just interested to know how to do stuff like requesting memory from the O/S. Anyone recommend any easy reading, as I'm a tad out of practice? Cheers, Rich
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Yes you make a good point. But the programmers who start when they are young or before College tend to lack the social skills that are needed such as communication and leadership skills. I agree with your arguement though.I dont think I have a complete programmer's mind, I more stumbled across the career path I am heading on.
The answers posted by me are suggestions only and cannot be used in anyway against me.
.netman wrote:
But the programmers who start when they are young or before College tend to lack the social skills that are needed such as communication and leadership skills.
I wonder where Microsoft MVPs fit. Most developer MVPs that I know that are in their 20s and 30s started programming as children. (Above that age the opportities were too rare for it to be a meaningful measure). Communication and leadership skills are also an important part of the programme, without those it would be very difficult to become an MVP.
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I was in school and my first project was making a stop sign that light red, yellow, green. I was using PC LOGO When did you start programming? And what was your first project?
N00R wrote:
When did you start programming?
I was about 22, I think.
N00R wrote:
And what was your first project?
Rebuilding an Altair 8800 microcomputer which had been built, then ripped apart by my predecessor in the job. Once I had the hardware working, I wrote an operating system and an assembler for it so that students at the school where I worked could do something useful with it. Of course, operating systems were a bit simpler then; read the port, store a byte, read the port, store a byte, etc. On ENTER, jump to 0x100 and run... :-D
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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I was in school and my first project was making a stop sign that light red, yellow, green. I was using PC LOGO When did you start programming? And what was your first project?
I would have been about 11 or 12, just after they got them new fangled valves working! I *think* it was an RM z/80 something, can't remember. They had the one machine for the whole school of 800 kids. The better you did at maths, the more comuter time you got. My first home machine was an Oric-1[^], a VIC20[^] and subsequently I moved into PC's. The languages available on that box were BASIC and machine code. I kind of enjoyed writing MC and playing the game of least number of instructions. We were kind of geeky I guess. Through college, I learnt further variants of BASIC, Pascal and Fortran. My first jobs were COBOL based and then I moved into VB (v1 & v2) and C via Oracle and DBA work. Now, I'm comfortable with more languages then I can remember without a manual. But my three year old[^] beats you all!
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done.
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Richard A. Abbott wrote:
Born 1953
I think I baby sat for you.
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Wow, you had an assembler - luxury! I was calculating byte codes for the Vic 20 (6502) then poking them into memory, waiting for Christmas to come to get that shiny Commodore Assembler cartridge! First real projects were a very simple word processor for the school PET 'cos we didn't have one and some software to allow the user to "program" lighting instructions for the Vic. It was an "IDE" written in basic for entering / editing and storing lighting commands as byte codes and a "runtime" in assembler to execute the codes and send signals to the port to connect with some fairly lethal hardware (I'm sure that somewhere along the line I'm owed a big royalty fee for the Java design!) We did manage to do a disco though running 7.5kW of lights, and nobody died. Off-topic: I've done some assembly on x86 (well x88 if we're being pedantic) processors (way back) but never on ones that had an operating system and am just interested to know how to do stuff like requesting memory from the O/S. Anyone recommend any easy reading, as I'm a tad out of practice? Cheers, Rich
Rich Leyshon wrote:
Wow, you had an assembler - luxury!
Well, I had to write my own assembler in basic for the Z80... Not exactly luxury, but I really learnt every bit of every op-code! Iain.
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I was 9 years old. I notice that too many people start when they leave school these days. That's sad.
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