Ok Which was very your first programming language?

[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

[Chris Quinn]

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

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

[ngbliss]

GOTRAN in 1964

[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.

[gritter55]

Timex Sinclair's built-in BASIC

[jsc42]

I did FORTRAN IV at school in the 6th form in the 1970s as well; but it was not my first language. I was not considered 'good enough' to be allowed in the classes that it was taught in; so I borrowed the teacher's book overnight and learnt from that. Like you, programming was on coding sheets that got sent to the County Council (West Sussex in my case). But their turn-around time was 4 weeks and they often mis-punched the cards; so I was very careful about desk-debugging before submitting the sheets. The Council machine was an IBM and I got into trouble for hacking the JCL and breaking the limits for no of pages printed, maximum job times etc. I went on a school trip to see an ICL mainframe (it was located less than 1/2 a mile from the school) and learnt about PLAN (Assembler for ICL 1900s) and vowed never to use it [little did I know then that I would be a PLAN programmer for 6 years!). In my summer holidays, I got a job with another organisation within 1/2 a mile of the school and got to see their IBM mainframe. Until then, I had no idea that computers were so ubiquitous. I also went on a trip to IBM in Havant and saw them wiring up mainframes - I was lucky, because that was the end of an era. I doubt if any commercially produced computers are hand wired today.