Ok Which was very your first programming language?

[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?

[John du Preez]

Microsoft Color Basic on a TRS-80 Color Computer in 1982. Upgraded by chip to Microsoft Extended Color Basic. Then also in the 80's Microsoft Extended Basic on a Spectravideo MSX 728. 30 years later i'm using exactly the same string manipulation language in Visual Basic.NET Framework 4.5. Cool huh? Assember, Pascal, C++ have come and gone in the interim.

codito ergo sum

[EinA]

APL and Basic on an IBM 360 in Angle Park High School in about 1974 - using optical mark cards. No PC in those days but later built my own Apple IIe and had a TRS-80 - I think the floppy drives for that last one cost me $1200?

[eFotografo]

Commodore Basic on a VIC 20 (1980/1981), but after about 6 months I began mixing that with 6502 assembler (anybody remember "poke"? Those were the days, writing out 6502 assembler on paper, converting the opcodes into hex, typing them into "data" statements and looping over the lot, "poke"ing into memory :-))

[dszarkow]

FORTRAN IV, coded using punched cards, executed on an IBM 360 mainframe, circa 1965. With luck, I got two or three compiles accomplished each evening. It took about a week to get each programming assignment finished. You punched your code using a keypunch machine, added some system control cards, wrapped the stack with a rubber band and dropped it in a hopper. Eventually the system's operator fed your cards into a card reader, and returned them to you wrapped in one or more sheets of green/white paper containing your program's results. The work was done for an electrical engineering course titled "Numerical Methods and FORTRAN Programming". Since then, I've never had a job where I didn't have access to "personal computing" power!

Donald S. Szarkowicz, Ph.D. E-mail: dszarkow@hotmail.com

[Magnamus]

> anybody remember "poke"? ...and "peek"! Didn't the video RAM start at 1024 on the VIC20? I used PETs where it started at 32768. Wow - geek attack...

[Andrew Leeder]

Algol 60 on an Elliot 803 in 1967.

[NoelWalker]

My very first programming job was COBOL programming language on a Philips mainframe computer in Oss, Holland. Circa 1973.

[reilly96]

Basic on an IBM 360 using a teletype, 1977

[Clumpco]

Does flicking the switches on the front panel of a PDP-8 in 1973 count? Otherwise I'll give you Fortran 66 on an ICL 1900

[loctrice]

nwscript[^] Other than that my first attempt was Java, which I wasn't able to do cause I couldn't figure out how to get the compiler to work. I decided to go to college and learn how to do the rest. In college, it was c++,javascript, vb.net, and intro to linux (bash scripts and a very simple c program) for my first semester.

If it moves, compile it

[ngbliss]

GOTRAN in 1964

[Chris Quinn]

1.8K? Luxury! I had to make do with a 1K ZX81!

==================================== Transvestites - Roberts in Disguise! ====================================

[Lost User]

Fortran 77, left it in 79, and never missed it

[svella]

APL on on IBM 5100[^] 1976, age 13.

[keithblack]

My first programming language was Dec PDP8 assembler 40 years ago. Thought myself from a little book which I still have. Built a very large accounting system using assembler. Still have a little chunk of the core memory from that machine also. DCA WHAT TAD WHAT

Keith

[Cliff Cooley]

NICOL (1971)

[jsc42]

Actually, this was my 2nd programming language ... Olivetti P101 Desktop Computer. You could either have 120 program locations and 3 memory locations or 96 program locations and 5 memory locations. 24 program locations were mapped over two of the memory locations; so you could write programs that started in the overlaid locations and then used the same places as memory. It supported the 4 basic operators andhad some limited jump capabilities - the jump destination labels were program instructions rather than addresses. Output was to a till roll. I wrote a program to perform trigonometric functions (Sine, Cosine, Tangent) and another to perform logorithmic function (Log10, ALog10, Exp, Ln). I cannot recall what else I did with it.