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

BrainiacV

15, pre-high school (high school where I'm from started at 10th grade) in FOCAL-8. I didn't have access to computers before then otherwise it would have been 5-10 minutes after birth. :cool: A buddy I had met through a model rocketry club had a card deck with him at one of the meetings. I expressed interest and he said he was going to teach me right. He gave me a book on PDP-8 Assembler. For two weeks I struggled with with bits, words, and opcodes and barely got the rationale. One night, we went out to the computer center with another friend of his. While he was in the computer room running a program on the IBM 1403, his buddy said, "Psst, wanna write a program?" Of course I said yes. He said type FOCAL, once it came up he said now type 1.1 T "HELLO" and then GO. It printed "HELLO". I screamed, "THAT'S IT? THAT'S ALL I HAVE TO DO?" And I was off to the races. It did help, the weeks I attempted to learn Assembly, I knew it was underneath everything I was doing and before the school year was out I had moved to BASIC and then Assembler.

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.

Diego Briones Cortes

Does LOGO on Commodore 64 count? If it does, I was 8. If not, I was 15 when I wrote my first line in Turbo Pascal. Saludos....

Diego

aaronlupo

My dad started me off at the ripe old age of 5. Apple IIe, BASIC. :)

Cj Welborn

I was 10. My mom gave me a book full of BASIC games. The idea was you copy the code, modify it, and learn how to program. I used QBasic because it was already installed in Windows 3.1. I never fully learned BASIC, just the 'basics' you could say. But it did peek my interest, and later on down the road when I saw this thing called 'Visual Basic 3.0', and what I could do with it, I was hooked. I know a couple languages now, and enough about C/C++ to do some damage. If it wasn't for that book I wouldn't know any languages, nor would I care to.

-Cj import this; import that; del that

Bitbeisser

16. In Pascal, first on paper only, then after a couple of weeks, on a PDP-8, feed by punch tape... ;P (looks like I am showing my age now...:cool:

CJLopez

Does HTML count? I started Web development in 1998, i was 14 at the time. Then i immersed myself on the scripting language used on RPGMaker, developing my own battle system as I didn't liked much the Dragon Quest styled battle system the program had, i was more of a Final Fantasy/Chrono Trigger fan. Later tried luck with Mugen, but i didn't fiddle with it much, just created a couple of characters My first true line of code was Pascal, back in 2001, the typical hello world. The came around and wrote a little account program for my mom, to help her keep the house accounting in check

User 4570113

I was 14 50 years ago. It was a machine with only code punching on a punch card. Punching single holes in it. The program was 1st upper half of the card, then the lower part of it.

Martin Berger

On my Commodore 64 when I was 17.

dpminusa

Not until 18. Late bloomer. That was in 1964, so the only places to get access before you had a job were Universities.

"Courtesy is the product of a mature, disciplined mind ... ridicule is lack of the same - DPM"

MSHYYC

I was 7 years old. It was on a Bell+Howell computer at school (which was an Apple II+ painted black, with different badge and a "suitcsae handle" with proper paddle ports and ectra A/V connectors on the back). It was actually not Applesoft nor Integer BASIC either; it was in LOGO, to draw a square with the "turtle". The next year we had two Commodore 64s placed in our classroom. Students interested in using them at lunch hour had to get a "computer license" from our homeroom teacher--he would provide us with a lesson and have us write a quiz. Then we got a little laminated card as our "license to compute". We would sign up for a turn to use one of the C64s during the lunch hour/recess first come first served up to a maximum number of times a month (since about 10 kids were "licensed" and there were 2 computers you could not used them daily). The "license" was invented by the teacher basically to teach the rules of using the computers properly and to restrict access to the computers by the less responsible students. I wrote LOGO and Basic code on the C64. I was 9 when we got our first computer at home--a Coleco ADAM. I wrote SmartBASIC (Applesoft compatible BASIC port with some mods to take advantage of ADAM's superior graphics and sound), SmartLOGO and MBASIC on CP/M (which the ADAM ran as an alternative to the built in EOS operating system). That was when I first wrote code on my very own computer. I wrote my first line of assembly code on the ADAM (Z80 assembly). All this happened before QBasic (I wrote that first line of assembly the summer before QuickBASIC 1.0 was released), and before my introduction to the MS-DOS world of computing. Guess that makes me younger than a few here, but older than many.

BotReject

About 13, on a VIC-20 computer. I still program as a hobby, only mostly in C++, C#, Java, PHP and JavaScript these days.

Alan Burkhart

I was in my 20s in 1983 and my sister in-law gave me this TI 99-4A. I was hooked inside of 30 minutes.

XAlan Burkhart

Earl Truss

Let's see ... I was a junior in college and decided to take a FORTRAN programming class because I had heard about computers from a friend who was taking a COBOL class. That would make me .. uh .. 20 at the time. It was the class that made me decide to program for a living. Now I can hardly wait to stop doing it.

patbob

I still have an unpunched punch card. And that's as much as I'll say on the matter :)

We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.

andychurchill

If I have my dates right, 1991, aged 11. I know we stayed at my uncle's house when Terminator 2 came out at the cinema when we were staying at their house one year, but it might have been a year or two earlier than that. It was Sinclair Basic. My uncle introduced me to coding. He wasn't even a programmer himself, actually a deep sea diver, but had been writing utilities to help with the day job. My cousin, a good few years than older me, also showed me how to create a loading screen. He didn't become a programmer either. But I was hooked after that. Managed to get my parents to buy me a C64 so I could learn more at home.

Andrew Code R

I remember it well - 1981 with a Sinclair ZX81. I was 11 years old and had to teach myself, which as it turns out was the best way to learn to program :-D

Steve Mayfield

18, in college - personal computers were still 5 years away

Steve _________________ I C(++) therefore I am

User 10271622

Same here, except I didn't have any idea of I was doing at the time. PCM, ftw! ("PC Magazine") They had a bunch of qbasic code in the back of each magazine for different games.

Cloud William

I was 16, in high school, 1973. Programmable calculator called Compucorp 025, about the size of an IBM Selectric typewriter (anybody remember typewriters?) with 10-key numeric entry. The program was read from punch cards, the language was assembler. It was like a drug. I haven't been able to stop since.

Chad3F

9 +/- 1, on a Commodore 64.