Ok Which was very your first programming language?

Member 4194593

This was 1966. I meant 26 instructions per card, the last two columns would usually have a binary count if there were more than 1 card to be booted. I noticed that I also said 3 octal characters per column, it was actually 4 octal characters per column (36 bit instructions, 12 octal characters per instruction). It was all so very long ago. Dave.

Vivi Chellappa

Member 4194593 wrote:

It was all so very long ago.

True. And I have seen and used the 80-column punched card so it clicked in my mind. People like you who have worked on bare metal, and that too when the hardware was buggy, deserve the respect of everyone who works with computers. Folks like you have made today's advances possible :rose: though some people think that computers came into existence in 1971(?) with Unix. :sigh:

Member 4194593

Thank you for the :rose: Interestingly, the GE 645 and project MAC were a joint project (in 1966) with MIT, GE, and Bell Labs, and it was later (1971) that K&R (who worked at Bell Labs) invented the C programming language used in Unix. The GE 645 was discrete component machine (no LSI), but one of the speed bottlenecks in the GE 645 under MULTICS was the slow operation of the associative memory unit, the unit that saved all of the system descriptors (a huge :laugh: array of 16 locations in the kernel that had a hardware LRU so the least recently used descriptor could be over layed with any new descriptor that was needed). The determination was made by project MAC that the associative memory would be re-implemented in LSI by GE. The engineers were going to first re-implement this in LSI exactly as it existed in the discrete component implementation, then, later, enhance it and expand it. Massive fail, it didn't work, bad implementation. The engineers discovered that I had a program (about 6 or 7 cards) that would verify that this unit was correctly determining the correct LRU descriptor. The program could be booted into the machine thru the reader, and it would halt at specific points with specific register values to identify failure points or a good result (all of this documented on my coding sheets as comments for each halt). The engineers didn't believe some of my error halts and I had to show them in the original logic drawings how the unit was actually designed to work. They finally understood the design, corrected the initial implementation, and then developed the enhanced version. Fun times, working 3RD shift on the floor with all of the new hardware. OBTW the T&D unit got a new manager and he checked with the engineers to see if they knew any potential T&D developers on the floor. Guess whose name came up. I was in software (T&D) development, on the 1ST shift! :-O Dave.

Selumbei

IBM 1620 Assembler - now that was a long time ago!

Lost User

My first programming language was ALGOL on a HP computer with 16KB magnetic-core memory. Feeling like a Dinosaur compared to others.

ii_noname_ii

Logo + ! When I discovered functions, I was blown away.

Mike Winiberg

FORTRAN, on an ICL 1903, in 1972/3, whilst in the 6th form We had to write out our programs on ICT coding sheets (I still have a few as a memento!) and submit them to the County Council mainframe, we got the results back 1n the next lesson (a week later!)

Anna Jayne Metcalfe

AppleSoft Basic on (I kid you not) an Apple ///. Once my Dad added Z-80 CP/M 2.2 co-processor I was off into the realms of assembler, JRT Pascal and Small-C. :thumbsup:

Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"

rmovchan

ALGOL 60, in 1977.

Oshtri Deka

Basic on outdated Apple|| compatible machine, then QBasic on 286 machine, that was during secondary education. Both courses were part of compulsory curriculum and sucked, though I've learned how to make never-ending loop. Therefore I consider Fortran as my first programming language (entry-level college course), because I actually learned something.

Stefan_Lang

Pascal, in Octobre 1984, at University. The biggest program I did was a fully workable board game called Kalah, based on a programming task we were given to program a min-max game tree for the same. At about the same time I purchased my first real computer, the C=ommodore(TM) Plus 4, but I never dabbled into Basic programming until after I've learned the basics (pun not intended, but appreciated). Spent considerably more time on 6502 Assembler than Basic though. The only Basic program I ever wrote was a Tetris Clone on "Micro Basic", the only compiler for the C=+4 I could find at the time.

xiecsuk

My first was Algol (I think) on an Elliot 803 in 1962. I then progressed to Fortran. Later, for fun, it was Basic on the Spectrum. And today it's C# and ASP.NET in Visual Studio 10.

Eaverae

Philips Cassette BASIC. Used it to program games (although I had no idea what programming was at the time) on a P2000T. Awesome computer.

"My opinion is not represented by my hometown."

Harry Neethling

Started in school with Java, and used Ready to program with Java 1.7.1 I think.

Jono7AC

ZX BASIC on a Sinclair ZX-81.

hhexo

The first language I used to write a non-trivial program was (Quick)Basic, in 1991, I think. I wrote a text-based adventure game and a little program that did some basic math, to do my school homework for me. ;-) Laziness for the win. I was 11 at the time... good times. Later on in the early '90s I hacked a couple of games (infinite lives!) by running them in DOS's "debug", so I dabbled with x86 assembler. Then I moved on to Visual Basic and Hexen-C (the C-like scripting language for modding the game Hexen), and then started doing proper programming in C and C++.

-+ HHexo +-

RogelioP EX DE HL

Norm .net wrote:

What was yours?

Motorola 6800 Assembly back in 1980 :cool: -- RP

Alexander DiMauro

TI-Basic (1981) on a TI-99/4A. I miss that computer... :^)

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone - Bjarne Stroustrup The world is going to laugh at you anyway, might as well crack the 1st joke! My code has no bugs, it runs exactly as it was written.

Magnamus

Microsoft Basic and 6502 assembly on a CBM4016. (I didn't learn Pick Databasic, Proc & TCL until much later, although mine was ADDS not MD)

Ron Harshbarger

Hmmm. 1963, Fortran,mainframe, punch cards, argh! How did we survive?