Ok Which was very your first programming language?

[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.

[Stuart B]

Mine was COBOL on an IBM system 3 model 360 mini computer in vocational technical school back in '81 when I was 17, using 80-column punch cards. The following year it was RPGII using 96-column punch cards on the same type of computer and card reader.

[etkid84]

I would program in Ada in a NY second or NY minute. Ada is a great language and is still used for DO-178 fielded instrumentation today. I have no language preference, and would do any of them. I still have an interest in Ada today.

David

[eFotografo]

My memory is a little hazy now, lol, but I think you're right. I do remember that most cartridges loaded at 8192 (autorunning from there), and I also had an 8Kb (!) memory extension board, with a slot which allowed another (e.g. game) cartridge to be loaded at the same time. The extra 8K of memory normally loaded at address 16384, but was jumper switchable to load at 8192. That was «cough» useful, because it enabled me to load a game cartridge, without the autorun feature activating! This in turn let me "peek" the ROM cartridge bytes and "poke" them to the RAM underneath (RAM loaded at 8192 was effectively "write only" when a ROM cartridge was also loaded at 8192 :-)) That in turn allowed me to «cough, cough» "backup" a friend's cartridge game "Cookie Monsters" (Commodore version of pacman :-)) I switched the RAM module back to load at 16384, inserted my dis/assembler cartridge, and hand edited every absolute address I could find until the game worked correctly. Took me a few days LOL, and after I'd done it I immediately lost interest in the game, but it was fun! I used a similar trick to add a few "missing" (well, undocumented) 6502 assembler mnemonics to the Commodore dis/assembler (after figuring out how the letters of each mnemonic e.g. LDA, STA etc. were used to create a lookup key for the instruction codes themselves. If I remember correctly, "LDA" was 160 / 0xA0 :-)) Which reminds me, a year before I started programming my VIC, I was typing in BASIC programs (from computer magazines) on Commodore PETs (40x24 green screen) at the local Further Education college! And my interest in assembly programming was piqued even then, when I saw one of the other (couple of years older) boys performing hex edits of a "Space Invaders" clone, altering the speed and number of rows of aliens :-) Then I grew up and became a C++ programmer LOL.

[StatementTerminator]

MS BASIC on a TRS-80 MC-10 (baby CoCo), circa 1984. Good times. I'm still waiting for a program to load from cassette, should be any year now.

[ClockMeister]

FORTRAN IV Level G1 running on the Cyber-74 at Georgia Tech: circa 1976.

[ENOTTY]

VIC-20 BASIC when I was 13, then 6510 assembler, COMAL and Pascal on the C64 and FORTRAN77, COBOL and SPL on the HP3000/MPE IV at school and C on a VAX/VMS during a summer job.

[Jimmi Galagher]

Sinclair Basic, on my ZX Spectrum 48K...! :) back in '84-'85. Those were the days. And because I didn't had enough allowance to buy a tape recorder, I wrote my first 2-3 games out of a coding book to play for as long as speccy was on... :)