Skip to content
  • Categories
  • Recent
  • Tags
  • Popular
  • World
  • Users
  • Groups
Skins
  • Light
  • Cerulean
  • Cosmo
  • Flatly
  • Journal
  • Litera
  • Lumen
  • Lux
  • Materia
  • Minty
  • Morph
  • Pulse
  • Sandstone
  • Simplex
  • Sketchy
  • Spacelab
  • United
  • Yeti
  • Zephyr
  • Dark
  • Cyborg
  • Darkly
  • Quartz
  • Slate
  • Solar
  • Superhero
  • Vapor

  • Default (No Skin)
  • No Skin
Collapse
Code Project
  1. Home
  2. The Lounge
  3. How old were you when you first wrote a line of code ?

How old were you when you first wrote a line of code ?

Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved The Lounge
question
206 Posts 185 Posters 74 Views 1 Watching
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as topic
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
  • F fbowmanmalta

    11. It was code inspired by the listings in the Commodore 64's User Manual. Great times. It was 1983.

    J Offline
    J Offline
    John Wellbelove
    wrote on last edited by
    #63

    About 1976 at a pre-college introduction to electronics at Portsmouth University (then Polytechnic). I was 16 and we programmed a large computer that was kept in its own air-conditions room using BASIC. The code was loaded using punched tape. There was a medium sized box sitting on the table, that we were told was their new computer that had the same power as the room sized one did. (The room sized one was based on discrete transisters with wire-wrap connections).

    1 Reply Last reply
    0
    • C Captain Price

      :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

      "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

      T Offline
      T Offline
      ThePotty1
      wrote on last edited by
      #64

      It depends what you call a line of code. When I was 5 or 6, my dad brought home a Burroughs dumb terminal without any sort of storage at all. Later we got a tape drive so we could save stuff, truly something to make you remember stiffy drives with something like fondness. My older brother was the true driver of the process, but we had a couple of dot-matrix printouts of program listings, entirely ones & zeros, pages of the stuff, and if you typed them in without any errors, you got space invaders, pacman, or the like. If you made a mistake later in the listing, you might still be able to recover and fix the mistake, but an early typo was instant death. So, my brother and I would enter this lot over a couple of hours, he would use some arcane trick to make it run, then the terminal was left on for a couple of days or weeks until we lost interest. Then I went on to study chemistry, and only came back to programming in my mid-20's. COBOL, to show my age. Although really when I started COBOL, people had been calling it a dead language for decades.

      1 Reply Last reply
      0
      • C Captain Price

        :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

        "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

        B Offline
        B Offline
        Behzad Sedighzadeh
        wrote on last edited by
        #65

        10! With this! And i won't ever forget the first days of playing with it!

        Behzad

        1 Reply Last reply
        0
        • C Captain Price

          :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

          "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

          A Offline
          A Offline
          Ali Eshtehari Pour
          wrote on last edited by
          #66

          I was 9 when I wrote my first line of code, and it was in BASIC programming language. :java:

          1 Reply Last reply
          0
          • G glennPattonWork3

            You could hook up a cassette player (remember them?) and save/load it was horrible and noisy :)

            A Offline
            A Offline
            AngloThaiSolutions
            wrote on last edited by
            #67

            Yeah - never had on the ZX81 (it was a school machine - bought by the local authorities - one of two for the whole school) - but had one on the old Vic20 and CBM64 - 20 minutes to load a game and failed as often as not too!

            G 1 Reply Last reply
            0
            • C Captain Price

              :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

              "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

              M Offline
              M Offline
              Marc Dispa
              wrote on last edited by
              #68

              I was 20. In the year '66, when I was student at Liege university. Fortran on IBM 360 first. Later: fortran (IBM 370), edl (IBM Series 1), assembler (PC), and now c/c++ whith PHP, javascript, etc

              1 Reply Last reply
              0
              • A AngloThaiSolutions

                Yeah - never had on the ZX81 (it was a school machine - bought by the local authorities - one of two for the whole school) - but had one on the old Vic20 and CBM64 - 20 minutes to load a game and failed as often as not too!

                G Offline
                G Offline
                glennPattonWork3
                wrote on last edited by
                #69

                Mmm the good old days, swapping tapes, praying for it to work, kids these days, online gaming mutter...

                1 Reply Last reply
                0
                • C Captain Price

                  :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

                  "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

                  S Offline
                  S Offline
                  Septimus Hedgehog
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #70

                  Probably about 19. We only had mainframes back then. I had to be trained to use an IBM card punch before I was allowed to write my first line of code in Fortran IV. Those, writes he, wiping the beer froth from his mouth and putting the glass down on the table followed by a resounding belch of satifaction, now those were the days of development. Edit: Card punch[^]. Don't waste time looking for a backspace/delete key. ;)

                  If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.

                  1 Reply Last reply
                  0
                  • C Captain Price

                    :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

                    "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

                    A Offline
                    A Offline
                    Alaajabre
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #71

                    16 VB6 it was like magic I'm order the computer write whatever I want :D

                    1 Reply Last reply
                    0
                    • C Captain Price

                      :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

                      "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

                      S Offline
                      S Offline
                      Sascha Atrops
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #72

                      1986, I was 9. We had an optional course in the 4th grade, programming on a Commodore 64. At the age of 12 I became an C128D which I used to write a paint programm. With 14 I bought my own paint programm at the supermarket published on a disk magazine. That was a great experience. :-)

                      1 Reply Last reply
                      0
                      • R Ron Beyer

                        12 or so, spent a lot of time doing weird things with QBasic and TrueBasic.

                        J Offline
                        J Offline
                        Jane Hunter
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #73

                        62. Seriously. I worked as a reporter, writer and researcher until then.

                        T 1 Reply Last reply
                        0
                        • C Captain Price

                          :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

                          "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

                          D Offline
                          D Offline
                          DerekT P
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #74

                          Just turned 11. First "instructions" involved our Maths class directing our teacher from the door to his desk, using only a "turn right", "turn left", "walk" and "stop" instruction set. He ended up bruised but we (well me at least) learnt some basic concepts of coding. Next lesson we were introduced to Elliot 903 machine code and after some simple paper exercises, a couple of weeks later used a single-hole manual punch (i.e. a square bit of metal you poked through one of 8 holes in a template) to make holes in a punch card. The cards took more than two weeks to return from the University with our punching errors. By the end of the following term we'd multiplied two numbers together. Basic came the following year and the year after that I'd written my first Cobol "compiler" (actually an interpreter) itself written in Basic... (the others were mucking about with StarTrek games; I was writing a Cobol compiler... :wtf: :sigh: why???)

                          1 Reply Last reply
                          0
                          • C Captain Price

                            :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

                            "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

                            T Offline
                            T Offline
                            Tarrquin
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #75

                            1968, 17 years old, COBOL on a IBM 360/40 - a REAL computer with flashing lights on the front :-)

                            Everything comes to him that waits. Come on, Camelot, I'm waiting...

                            1 Reply Last reply
                            0
                            • C Captain Price

                              :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

                              "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

                              S Offline
                              S Offline
                              Sujendra shrestha
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #76

                              2006 A.D 14 yrs old when I wrote my first hello world program in Qbasic...... :)

                              1 Reply Last reply
                              0
                              • C Captain Price

                                :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

                                "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

                                C Offline
                                C Offline
                                CARNESECCHILuc
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #77

                                First time was in October 1973, I was 21 at computer engineer school, language APL on a teletype with punched tape computer : IRIS 80 under system SIRIS 7, and it was the Fibonacci suite... And last time I wrote a line of code was this morning, 40 years later, take or leave 2 weeks, it was VB on a PC, and it was modelization of a Robot in 3D.

                                1 Reply Last reply
                                0
                                • C Captain Price

                                  :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

                                  "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

                                  L Offline
                                  L Offline
                                  Luca Zenari
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #78

                                  9 or 10 (circa 1992), if you consider Logo as a valid "first line of code". Otherwise, I was 11 when I wrote my first line of QBasic.

                                  1 Reply Last reply
                                  0
                                  • S SinKien

                                    7 or 8, BASIC on C-128

                                    D Offline
                                    D Offline
                                    Dannoman1234
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #79

                                    7, on a Timex Sinclair 1000, BASIC language.

                                    G 1 Reply Last reply
                                    0
                                    • C Captain Price

                                      :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

                                      "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

                                      B Offline
                                      B Offline
                                      bdtcomp
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #80

                                      I was 18 when I first programmed, a freshman at college. It was Fortran. I couldn't understand subroutines at the time. It just seemed foreign to me and I think it was the way it was taught. I didn't like computers at the time, and I could only type up punch cards. I loved the computer building with it's glass surrounded by the giant computer.

                                      1 Reply Last reply
                                      0
                                      • C Captain Price

                                        :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

                                        "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

                                        J Offline
                                        J Offline
                                        Jason_SA
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #81

                                        14. (1983) Saved for 6 months (I was paid for washing my dad's car, mowing the lawn, weeding, etc.) and bought a Commodore 64. Spent afternoons after school with a friend listening to Prince and Michael Jackson's Thriller while coding ROM BASIC with the c64 plugged into his television set. We both learnt the hard way to first SAVE to the tape drive before running any new code! I cannot remember how many hours of code we lost because of system crashes. LOL

                                        1 Reply Last reply
                                        0
                                        • C Captain Price

                                          :-D :sigh: :zzz: :wtf:

                                          "If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

                                          R Offline
                                          R Offline
                                          rohith naik
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #82

                                          When I was 15 and entered 11th grade around 2006 . It was around then that i got interested into coding. starting coding at 15 was relatively quite early in India where most people do not have a computer at home even now. Luckily for me my school helped me tremendously.

                                          1 Reply Last reply
                                          0
                                          Reply
                                          • Reply as topic
                                          Log in to reply
                                          • Oldest to Newest
                                          • Newest to Oldest
                                          • Most Votes


                                          • Login

                                          • Don't have an account? Register

                                          • Login or register to search.
                                          • First post
                                            Last post
                                          0
                                          • Categories
                                          • Recent
                                          • Tags
                                          • Popular
                                          • World
                                          • Users
                                          • Groups