Ok Which was very your first programming language?

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... :)

Magnamus

Haha that's insane! But I was no better. The datasette decks for our PETs never worked so I couldn't back-up the code I was writing for my Computer Studies 'O' level, so instead I had to print it out and then retype the lot the following day to work on it again :) After that I wrote an assembler, using a 6502 assembly language book, and basing it on the AJ Trott one we had that only worked for a few days before some lummox broke one of the pins off the ROM. (Wasn't me, honest!). My assembler worked ok but I could never get the disassembler working, for some reason I never figured out. I've actually still got a CBM3032 in my shed, with 1541 disk drive and printer. It worked the last time I switched in on (about 12 years ago) - probably doesn't now. Might have to try it when I get home now... :)

Member 4726003

GW-Basic, 1991.

Narud Shiro

Turbo Pascal 3.0 on 1987, when I was on the last year of high school :cool:

Lost User

In 1961 I was programming LEO III machine code on 2 rows of binary switches, one row to specify the memory address and the other to enter the program code itself. It was quite a slow & error prone process !!!!

Member 110323

BASIC on a TRS-80 at the back of the Math classroom in High School - 1980. Soon got my own TRS-80 Color Computer. Shortly thereafter got frustrated at the limits of 4K (yeah 4096) bytes of RAM - couldn't write very interesting games with 4K. Began poking Motorola 6809 instruction into memory. Imagine my joy upon discovering there was something called "Assembly Language". Ah well, memory lane...

horia67

Fortran

BrainiacV

A friend tried to start me off "the right way" by throwing a book on DEC PDP-8/I assembler programming at me. I struggled for a couple weeks trying to get my head around accumulator registers, flags and address space. A friend of his said, "Psst, Wanna write a program?" And showed me how to write a one line program in FOCAL-8. After seeing it I screamed, "THAT'S IT? That's all I have to do?" and I was off to the races. I quickly ran into the limits of FOCAL and moved to BASIC (back when you had to use the LET command to do assignments). But I always remembered that the assembler and machine code were behind it all and eventually wrote all sorts of utilities for the TSS-8/I operating system in PALD-8. After that it was FORTRAN and COBOL.

Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.

Robert Valska

mine was MAD Michigan Algorithm Decoder and then FORTRAN

Tom Sacramento

Honeywell 6000 GMAP and IBM FORTRAN IV - 1979.