My first language and interesting early software projects.

[Steve Mayfield]

I wrote a Motorola 6800 version of DEC Teco (text editor with extensive scripting capabilities) and Runoff (text processor using embedded formatting commands like .center) back in the mid 70s - Teco took less than 12k and Runoff was even smaller. :cool: The programs were revised for the 6809 when that processor was introduced in the early 80s.

Steve _________________ I C(++) therefore I am

[Brady Kelly]

My chronology of languages is somewhat shorter: MS Basic on the ZX-81 and ZX Spectrum. C and C++ on my first PC, but only dabbling. Never wrote more than Hello World that worked. Clarion. VB 6 SAP ABAP/4 SQL C# V.NET JavaScript TypeScript (just starting)

[vonb]

IBM BASICA DOS BATCH FILES 8086 ASSEMBLER BORLAND DELPHI BORLAND TURBO PASCAL BORLAND TURBO C (Pretty good package at that time) VBA VB 6 VB.NET C# (For me the best)

[YvesDaoust]

My very first computer programming language was FORTRAN IV on an IBM 360. (I could also mention my beloved Texas Instruments SR-52 wonder, but I am no more sure it came first.) The first useful program was a function plotting utility, character-based, outputting on A3 sized pin-fed sheets with a chain printer. This program was used for real. I never saw the computer, I was living 50 km away from it.

[YvesDaoust]

Not involving a programming language, but I want to recall this anecdote. My very very first program was a procedure to quickly compute cube roots on a 4 operations calculator:

// Store the argument to memory
MC
M+

// Repeat
*
MR

Sqrt
Sqrt
// Until convergence

Convergence comes in about 14 iterations for an 8 digits display, for a total of 72 keystrokes. On some machines, the = operation is not required.

[winsteps]

Folks, does anyone here pre-date me? First computer language, 1965: EDSAC2 Autocode in a programming course taught by Dr. Maurice Wilkes (who wrote the first book on computer programming, published in 1951). But there was a huge resource-constraint! Computer time was so valuable that we students were not allowed to run our programs. Dr. Wilkes desk-checked them. Then, for an interesting "software" project, later in 1965, I worked as a programmer for Electronic Associates who manufactured analog plug-board computers. One of my first projects was a real-time oil-field simulation on an EAI 360 which was somewhat bigger than this: http://www.technikum29.de/shared/photos/rechnertechnik/eai180.jpg - programming was done with wires.

[dusty_dex]

>My first real computer was an Acorn BBC model B which was, at the time, an extraordinary piece of hardware.< The whole machine was a marvel of clearly thought out integration between hardware and software. Perhaps THE best example of a totally accessible computer system. The Archimedes wasn't half bad either, I wonder what happened to those nice ARM people. LOL

"It's true that hard work never killed anyone. But I figure, why take the chance." - Ronald Reagan That's what machines are for. Got a problem? Sleep on it.

[Cliff Cooley]

FORTRAN NICOL PLAN RPG2 COBOL QM (QueryMaster) & AM (ApplicationsMaster ?) COBRA BASIC (various flavours) C C++ VB (3/4/5/6) Java JavaScript VB.NET C# + various scripting languages (CL, SCL, DOS, VBS)

[Gary Wheeler]

My step-dad bought a COSMAC ELF 1802 single-board computer. It originally had two 7 segment displays and a hex keypad. John, an electrical engineer, added a teletype interface and hooked the thing up to an old KSR 33 teletype. We found a version of Tiny Basic for it that took up about 1.3K of the 2K of RAM. After fat-fingering in the Tiny Basic, and then painstakingly patching it to do I/O via the teletype, we kept the thing running using a car battery as backup. The most extraordinary program I remember us writing for the thing was a mortgage amortization table program. Tiny Basic only had 26 16-bit integer variables named A-Z, so you had to do fixed point arithmetic and manage overflows and large values yourself. The program ran overnight, chugging out a line of data every minute or so.

Software Zen: delete this;

[DerekT P]

We had a forward-looking Maths teacher in my first year at senior school, 1969. He taught us the principles of programming by having us navigate him around the classroom using only commands "Forward", "Right", "Left", "Stop". Think he must have had quite a few bruises. After that he introduced us to a 4-bit machine code (Elliott 903) and later Fortran. We punched cards using a mechanical hand-held punch, sent them off by post and they'd arrive back about two weeks later with our punching and syntax errors. Took a whole year to run the most basic of programs! Later we had a teletype connection to a University in the North-east and could type up programs off-line onto paper tape, then load them over the dial-up line. Programs were effectively limited by the length of a spool of paper tape. I pushed that to the max when, having explored the boundaries of that first limited Basic, wanted to learn another language and taught myself COBOL. There was no Cobol compiler, so I wrote a Cobol interpreter using Basic. That was an interesting concept, BUT it did work! That early basic was constrained to single-character data names, but you could use arrays, so when you ran out of data names you just had to declare arrays of them and so A(1) could be totally unrelated to A(2) etc.. On to Uni where I extended my Fortran (Running on ICL mainframes, remember George III, MOP and MultiMop??) and the rest is history. Oh, and that Maths teacher had a word of advice for me when I left school: "Never go into Data Processing, you'll never make a living from it". Maybe not so forward looking, after all... :-D

[Cesar de Souza]

EasyUO[^] (yeah, really) Not a resource constrained one, but my first language. If it hadn't been for Ultima Online I guess I would never have learned actual programming years after.

Interested in Machine Learning in .NET? Check the Accord.NET Framework. See also Sequence Classifiers in C# with Hidden Conditional Random Fields.

[Gary Wheeler]

H.Brydon wrote:

I also wrote an operating system in machine language for PDP-11/05 with 2 X 8K core memory as storage

By any chance did you go to Wright State University[^] in the late 70's through early 80's? That matches a two course sequence I took there, 'Introduction to Real-Time Programming'. The first course was really "learn PDP-11 assembly language". The second introduced concurrent programming. The labs included a PDP-11/15 running RSX-11 that we used to edit and assemble our source code, and then two PDP-11/05's for testing. The 05's included core memory that mainly stored the RT-11 bootstrap code, which student apps routinely overwrote. You then had to toggle in the bootstrap, about 80 words worth, via the front-panel switches. I had to do it a couple of times. One guy in our class had to do it so often he could do the whole thing in less than 60 seconds. This was probably my second-favorite class in school :cool: (first favorite being the computer graphics sequence).

Software Zen: delete this;

[Fran Porretto]

Time was, it was hard to get anything done on a minicomputer unless you coded in assembler. Everyone programming minis worked in assembler at that time, which severely restricted the market for them...but made those of us with "assembler muscles" a rather valuable commodity. Of course, we often had to flex those muscles in some rather interesting ways.

One of my earliest commercial gigs had me programming the Data General NOVA 1200. If you've never heard of it, God bless you. It had a bare 32K 16-bit words of core memory, no floating point, no hardware multiply or divide, no stack, a single-level interrupt system, only four 16-bit registers, and an addressing scheme from Hell. Everyone who worked on it swore at it more or less continuously.

Our shop programmed and sold payments-processing systems that were state of the art at the time, though they were utterly obsolete before the 80s were very old. Some of our customers were very large companies. Telephone companies, in particular. And some of them had to deal with amounts that you couldn't fit in 16 bits. So we had software multiply and divide routines for 32-bit arithmetic to handle the larger amounts.

Then came The Really Big Customer: the customer whose figures wouldn't fit in 32 bits. Suddenly we needed 48-bit multiply and divide capabilities...but the payments-processing program had already grown so large that we had less than thirty words of memory left unused.

I was the stuckee.

I got it done, but it took, as the saying goes, "every trick in the book." At the end of the process I knew more about the NOVA 1200 machine language and binary arithmetic than I'd thought there was to learn. I've (mercifully) forgotten just about all of it.

Today, the microprocessor in your microwave oven has about 100 times the power of the NOVA 1200. But I'd bet no one has written a machine-language triple-precision arithmetic package for it. Ah well, it probably has hardware floating point.

(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)

[dusty_dex]

First exposure to computers, an Apple IIe at school. got my own zx81, BASIC & a bit of assembler (which had to be stored in REM statements) ATARI BASIC (shite and veeeery slow) 6502 Assembly & FORTH BBC Basic & more 6502 MC (had an awesome built in assembler with relocatable code options) PASCAL (Borland turbo v6) - my first foray in to OOP Bought Acorn Archimedes learnt ARM assembler got a DOS 2.11 Atari Portfolio and learnt C and x86 assembly on that promptly got a proper Laptop with green LCD (the viewing angle drifted as the battery expired) reluctantly picked up C++ and Java. X| It's been C/C++ and Javascript for the last 16yrs, just dabbled with a few functional languages along the way.

"It's true that hard work never killed anyone. But I figure, why take the chance." - Ronald Reagan That's what machines are for. Got a problem? Sleep on it.

[User 8294700]

First language was Fortran IV in college loaded via punch cards on the U of H computer. Lots of fun. We could have the mainframe mostly to ourselves at night because I lived on campus and could take the basement halls from the dorms to the lab in any weather. TRS80 and BASIC CPM and later MPM machine and CBASIC (an interpreter) MS DOS machines and CBASIC (Compiler version) Tried Forth, Pascal, assembler, C Still use CBASIC compiler version and Visual Basic for business aps. Most interesting project was a text editor I wrote WTTHOUT using a text editor to enter the code. echo dim a$(10)>nate.bas echo for j% = 1 to 10>>nate.bas echo input "enter a line";line a$(j%)>>nate.bas echo next j%>>nate.bas I then compiled nate.bas (Not Another #$!% Text Editor!) to get the next version of the editor. The result was a somewhat limited, but full screen text editor I still use today.

[Simon ORiordan from UK]

First language was Fortran IV; first real work was in 1982. Using Basic on a Commodore PET, I wrote an iterative design programme for forward swept wing fighters. The component weights were all expressed as multiparametric intrinsic equations dealing with geometry and each other. So you would demand a performance level; the first weight estimate would be used to calculate geometry; this would be used to calculate new weights, for the performance demanded. And so on. If the computer converged, it would print the parameters of the fighter design. If it didn't, you were asking the impossible.

[User 8294700]

I think I actually used the copy command: copy con: nate.bas for version 1

[Reese Currie]

Your story reminds me of mine. I also started with a TRS-80 "Color Computer 2" and Microsoft's BASIC, to which I added 6809 Assembler and then, C (which I had to get OS-9 to obtain). The problem was, OS-9's line editor was horrific; I couldn't stand working with it. So the first thing I did was write a line editor to replace it that worked more like the one on NCR ITX. (If anyone has used ITX's line editor, they know two things; a) my goal wasn't overly ambitious and b) OS-9's line editor must have been really bad, for an ITX style editor to be better.) On the plus side: I got to learn about pointers and doubly-linked lists and so forth which was a great start on C. It was also a very neat experience to spend a few hours in OS-9's editor writing just enough to get my own editor started, and then code the rest of it in my own editor. On the minus side, the text editor compiled to a little over 10K which left something like 5K left for editing! So setting up an editor I could stand ended up being the last significant thing I did on OS-9 because there wasn't enough memory space to do more. :laugh: I remember sitting down one day to write an enhancement to swap lines between disk and memory, and deciding that it just wasn't worth doing for a computer that connected to a TV.

[J Julian]

8085 Processor 2k RAM 4K ROM (upgraded to 8K because of feature creep :) ) 2 UARTS Multiple buttons and parallel control lines. Memory was used for general CPU usage (variables and stack) and double buffering the serial ports. Project was a data logging device that received data from a serial port and wrote it to a cassette tape in blocks. Had to handle searching for blocks, writing and reading, fast forward, reverse, and receiving text commands from the second serial port, that were mirrors of the front panel controls. Manager wanted a 8048 processor, but, fortunately, I did two designs and showed that the 8085 was a cheaper and more flexible design. The original specs pushed the 8048 resources, and the scope creep would have been impossible to do. Written in PLM-80 and assembler.

[BrainiacV]

(deep breath) DEC PDP-8/I TSS-8 FOCAL-8 BASIC-8 PALD (Assembler) IBM S/360 FORTRAN COBOL UNIVAC 418 ART-418 (Assembler) IBM S/370 PL/C, PL/I 370 Assembler Apple II Applesoft BASIC 6502 Assembler Various CP/M machines GW-BASIC CBASIC 8080 Assembler Misc micros 6800 Assembler 6809 Assembler Bally Home Arcade TERSE (FORTH derivative) Z-80 Assembler IBM S/34 RPG-II IBM PC 8086 Assembler LMI FORTH (16 bit) 80186 Assembler LMI FORTH (32 bit) 80386 Assembler 32 bit protected mode C (4, 5, 6) VB1, VB2, VB3, VB4, VB5, VB6 S/370 JCL (to write a parsing program in VB3 to aid a migration project) VBA SQL, PL/SQL Smalltalk VBScript JavaScript VB.NET (1.1, yuck, management insisted we convert all our ASP pages) T-SQL C#.NET (2.0 on) HP Calculators HP-9100A HP-65 HP-67 HP-41C, HP-41CV, HP-41CX HP-16 HP-48SX, HP-48GX HP-75 (whew) I think that is most of them, I left off duplicates of FORTRAN, COBOL, and some dialects of BASIC, I'm sure more will come to me later. Mostly in chronological order except for the calculators. I tried to skip the turkeys like PASCAL (and DELPHI) and C++. Would have taken a pass on Smalltalk, but management was on an Object kick, which reminds me of INFERENCE, which I had to take classes on but since it had hefty CPU and RAM requirements just to crawl, they decided it wasn't worth getting me a better computer even though it would have been the least of their expenditures. I've looked at F#, I could be wrong, but I think it is another language that will end up on the trash heap of history.

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.