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?
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.
Jon Smith & Wesson: The original point and click interface
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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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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 started when I was 5 or 6 on a BBC Micro first program was 10 Print "Hello" 20 GOTO 10 oh the joys.....
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Yep - that's the one. :) I had a great deal of fun on that machine. It was also the first one I hacked a compiler (a Small-C[^] implementation with floating point support to pieces on. Between that and JRT Pascal[^] I learnt everything I needed to know to get started with high level languages. :cool:
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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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! 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!
I've done my fair share of poking too. ;) I think I was quite lucky in that my Dad was given the machine by his work (pretty unusual at the time!), so I never had to mess around with cartridges and tapes....I was straight onto 5 1/4" floppy, and after a while we even had a (gasp!) 10MB hard disk. I don't have any references for memory management stuff I'm afraid. I picked up what I know from my Comp Eng course at Uni and reading BYTE magazine when it was still in print. I imagine it's changed significantly now (that was back when virtual 386 mode was a new thing!).
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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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.
Paul Watson wrote:
Luxury! Our dad beat us to death with Emily, the youngest of us!
Luxury!! your dad beat you with a soft person? Hell, my dad ripped off my arm, stripped it of flesh and then beat me with it! You don't EVEN want to know what he had the Nazis do to us! damned mutagens!
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
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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 started in high school, freshman year. My first project was teaching the owner of said computer how to program his own computer, then he had the bright idea of rewriting our favorite game. So I produced a graphical version of the text game that bombed Russia. Using only a TRS-80 and quarter text-block graphics figures, I produced a complete HUD with radar sweep and other controls. :) Unfortunately we tried to sell it back to the company who made it, got our first run-in with various business issues. :)
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
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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?
7 or 8 with for loop controlled block art on a trash 80. I played around a bit with qbasic later. My first major project was rewriting (in turbo pascal) a text based video poker game (with major WTFs like all global variables) hacked up by a classmate into a graphical draw poker game with a really crappy artificial idiot when I was 15. The next year for my final project in HS CS2, I wrote a tetris clone using raw VGA (instead of TP line art and fill) and a custom keyboard interrupt handler. Over the summer I partially wrote a top scrolling shooter. Lack of documentation did me in there. I knew what I needed (OO with polymorphism), but not that the language provided it. My attempts to do the same with a single class and function pointers never quite worked. :doh:
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall
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Paul Watson wrote:
Luxury! Our dad beat us to death with Emily, the youngest of us!
Luxury!! your dad beat you with a soft person? Hell, my dad ripped off my arm, stripped it of flesh and then beat me with it! You don't EVEN want to know what he had the Nazis do to us! damned mutagens!
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
El Corazon wrote:
my dad ripped off my arm
You had arms! Luxury! Dad long ago used up our limbs beating us to death. Emily was just a stump of rag and bone when he beat us. And only our rich neighbours had mutagens!
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
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Paul Watson wrote:
Luxury! Our dad beat us to death with Emily, the youngest of us!
Luxury!! your dad beat you with a soft person? Hell, my dad ripped off my arm, stripped it of flesh and then beat me with it! You don't EVEN want to know what he had the Nazis do to us! damned mutagens!
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
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El Corazon wrote:
Hell, my dad ripped off my arm
Literally?
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall
dan neely wrote:
Literally?
with his teeth! ;P
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
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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?
See my profile.
Imagine that you are hired to build a bridge over a river which gets slightly wider every day; sometimes it shrinks but nobody can predict when. Your client provides no concrete or steel, only timber and cut stone (but they won't tell you what kind). The coefficient of gravity changes randomly from hour to hour, as does the viscosity of air. Your only tools are a hacksaw, a chainsaw, a rubber mallet, and a length of rope. Welcome to my world. -Me explaining my job to an engineer