How much computer illiterate were you when...
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...you wrote your first program? In my case, I had no idea what operating system is. I did not knew I was using windows. Hell, I could not even start a computer. It was really scary. However, if someone could open the "black screen" for me, I could write C++ programs for them. This was the state for a long time. I was proud of myself thinking I could do anything in C++ but had no clue how to reach that black screen. I say anything as I was easily able to understand concept of pointer and templates and was even able to do graphics code. I thought I was awesome back then in year 2000. How about you? Edit: The sole purpose of this post is to feel young. ;P
Since I started my computer programming by flipping switches on the front of a bare-bones PDP-8 I was probably as computer literate as a 19 year old student could be in 1972. I quickly moved to assembly language on an Intel 8008 (with a brief spell on the 4004 while waiting for the prototype 8008 to arrive direct from Intel) on a dedicated card that I designed and built myself as a project for my sandwich course with BT (then the GPO).
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...you wrote your first program? In my case, I had no idea what operating system is. I did not knew I was using windows. Hell, I could not even start a computer. It was really scary. However, if someone could open the "black screen" for me, I could write C++ programs for them. This was the state for a long time. I was proud of myself thinking I could do anything in C++ but had no clue how to reach that black screen. I say anything as I was easily able to understand concept of pointer and templates and was even able to do graphics code. I thought I was awesome back then in year 2000. How about you? Edit: The sole purpose of this post is to feel young. ;P
I'm so old I can remember when 'Duktape' was called 'Duct Tape'. And why. Duktape? Dooktarrpay?
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...you wrote your first program? In my case, I had no idea what operating system is. I did not knew I was using windows. Hell, I could not even start a computer. It was really scary. However, if someone could open the "black screen" for me, I could write C++ programs for them. This was the state for a long time. I was proud of myself thinking I could do anything in C++ but had no clue how to reach that black screen. I say anything as I was easily able to understand concept of pointer and templates and was even able to do graphics code. I thought I was awesome back then in year 2000. How about you? Edit: The sole purpose of this post is to feel young. ;P
d@nish wrote:
...you wrote your first program?
Very. First off, it wasn't a program written by me but a long listing from a book into building speakers enclosures (Radio Shack) - me and a buddy skipped classes to take turns entering the whole thing into one of the school lab's TRS-80s... got the supervisor to help us out on attaching a recorder to save it to tape... he asked us if we had ran the program - what do you mean RUN the program? <- us. Rookie lab assistant comes in with the tape recorder, connects it to the computer, one ZAP! on the screen and I guess I was literate enough to understand the power of the static charge: the bloke caused the TRS-80 to reset and we lost 2 hours of typing in a microsecond. I had read about that in Popular Electronics late 70s. Six months after me and my posse were banned from the computer lab for a month for installing games in all the lab machines. It could have been that or the "fake" report cards we manufactured for those people in need of presenting something more palatable to their parents than the official ones :cool: -- RP
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Punched card had big advantages over "Modern" editors and HDDs. They taught you to write concise, efficient programs. Otherwise you needed wheels to move your code around! We didn't have "copy'n'paste", we had "drag'n'hernia"! That stuff got heavy quickly :laugh:
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
You left out "knocking over the card stack of the guy/gal you didn't like". My first program was a COBOL program, punched in, then fed to a 370/115. I was in my first semester of a Business Administration degree, fell in love with coding, transferred to a 2 year state tech, got an AS in coding and never looked back. Fortunately for me I never actually had to work on a Mainframe, PC's & 'Mini' computers were just coming into vogue, so that's what I've always worked on. C first, x86 asm, then C++.
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Punched card had big advantages over "Modern" editors and HDDs. They taught you to write concise, efficient programs. Otherwise you needed wheels to move your code around! We didn't have "copy'n'paste", we had "drag'n'hernia"! That stuff got heavy quickly :laugh:
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
Using punched cards taught me how to delicately fit a chad back into a mis-punched hole, and keep it in place with sticky tape. And clog up the card reader.
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Very, very, very. I didn't even see a computer until about six months after I started coding - we used punch cards in those days - being able to use a terminal and even an editor (poor by modern standards as it was) was a brilliant revelation! "Turning the computer on" had to wait about another year and the 5th computer I used: a PDP8. And starting that box was a bit harder than today:
Turn key to POWER.
Set all switches to 0
Click on EXTD
Set switches to 0x0018
Click on ADDR
Set switches to 0x0DE3
Click on DEP
Set switches to 0x0A19
Click on DEP
Set switches to 0x0080
Click on ADDR
Click on CLR
Verify HALT and STEP are up
Click on CONT(I cheated and checked the exact values, but I remembered it pretty well: only one digit error!)
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
I started on an ICL 1901, which was also switch operated. I can't remember all the switch combinations, but I seem to recall that to load a program required the use of the index and middle fingers on the left hand, and the index finger on the right hand, followed by pressing the green (I think) button.
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Yeah, with a separate attributes plane mapped at 0x5000 - so a massive hole in the memory preventing the EPROM being bigger than 16Kb... and no MMU in those days! I loved the HD64180 when we started using that because of the 1Mb memory space and a built in MMU. Bliss! And the SIO came in handy too. I was still using that in some new equipment designs in 2000, in its 32MHz form (purely because of the legacy Z80 code base, I moved to Arm processors as quickly as I could)
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
I also loved the Z80 because it was easy to memorise all the opcodes. I progressed to RML380Z from a home brew 8080 machine which I had to program in hex. Those were the days.
I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.
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There wasn't even a damn keyboard, half the time! :laugh:
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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...you wrote your first program? In my case, I had no idea what operating system is. I did not knew I was using windows. Hell, I could not even start a computer. It was really scary. However, if someone could open the "black screen" for me, I could write C++ programs for them. This was the state for a long time. I was proud of myself thinking I could do anything in C++ but had no clue how to reach that black screen. I say anything as I was easily able to understand concept of pointer and templates and was even able to do graphics code. I thought I was awesome back then in year 2000. How about you? Edit: The sole purpose of this post is to feel young. ;P
Very... My first programming experience was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 connected to a TV. Working the graveyard shift, I stayed up one morning to punch in a sample program from book or maybe it was in it's documentation. Hated the membrane keyboard. Hours and a few cups of coffee later I had a battleship game running in console basic. Then I wondered if I could modify it some it could continue to plot the cannon shot up beyond the top of TV screen. I made the change. Try it. It worked. I was hooked. Of course there was no storage. As soon as I turned it off, everything was gone.
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Certainly no screen - teletype only.
One place I worked at - National Institute For Biological Standards and Controls, in the early eighties - had two "punch girls" who got a sheet of numbers from the biologists, punched them onto paper tape on an offline teletype, then used the screen based terminal to run them through the PDP 11. If there were any mistakes, the paper tape was carefully edited to fix it with a knife and sticky tape and it was retried. When the run was complete, the paper tape went back to the biologist who binned it. :sigh: Took me months to get permission to teach them to plug the teletype into the PDP11 and forgo the paper tape - with a box on the submission sheet saying "I want the tape!" Then about twenty minutes to get them actual terminals, a week later - since they threatened to go on strike unless they did! :laugh:
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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Define Computer Literacy. When I wrote my first program I could plug the Commodore 64 into the TV, turn it on, get to the bit to type in the code and then run it. There wasn't a lot else to do, I could also put the tapes for the games into the tape player to load and then start the games.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Same here... only it was an Atari 400. I had a few programs written to audio tape that are lost to the ages. Probably taped over with White Lion or Def Leppard :doh: So I was very computer illiterate - the personal computer at that time would have been maybe a Heathkit that you built from the ground up, but that was not my level of dedication. First program? I remember staying up late getting my name to march around the screen in different ways. Good times. Good times *sigh*
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One place I worked at - National Institute For Biological Standards and Controls, in the early eighties - had two "punch girls" who got a sheet of numbers from the biologists, punched them onto paper tape on an offline teletype, then used the screen based terminal to run them through the PDP 11. If there were any mistakes, the paper tape was carefully edited to fix it with a knife and sticky tape and it was retried. When the run was complete, the paper tape went back to the biologist who binned it. :sigh: Took me months to get permission to teach them to plug the teletype into the PDP11 and forgo the paper tape - with a box on the submission sheet saying "I want the tape!" Then about twenty minutes to get them actual terminals, a week later - since they threatened to go on strike unless they did! :laugh:
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
At school we would often find that the paper tape would tangle as it was feeding into the reader on the ASR33 (no hopper to contain the tape) so we would clip the tape into the reader then lead the tape across the room and open a window and drop the tape out - the computer room was on the 3rd floor - so that it wasn't all coiled up. As it fed out of the reader (low speed 110 baud phone line meant this was a tedious process) we would roll it back up by hand and store the tapes in pipe tobacco tins (conveniently, the computer science teacher smoked a pipe).
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...you wrote your first program? In my case, I had no idea what operating system is. I did not knew I was using windows. Hell, I could not even start a computer. It was really scary. However, if someone could open the "black screen" for me, I could write C++ programs for them. This was the state for a long time. I was proud of myself thinking I could do anything in C++ but had no clue how to reach that black screen. I say anything as I was easily able to understand concept of pointer and templates and was even able to do graphics code. I thought I was awesome back then in year 2000. How about you? Edit: The sole purpose of this post is to feel young. ;P
I was 8 in the start of eighteens, with my brother's brand new Commodore 64, when he was out to play football... :-) I didn't speak any word in english, and all user manual was ONLY in english. I started to learn English because I saw the results of keywords when I wrote programs...
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Literacy as in knowing basic user operations before going to programming. For instance, knowing what left and right click is. I, for one, had no clue when I wrote programs for first few months.
Click? I wrote my first program on a Teletype creating a punched paper tape. It was done that way because it cost too much to develop it while connected to the timesharing service via an acoustic coupler. I think we had the high speed 300 baud version.
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...you wrote your first program? In my case, I had no idea what operating system is. I did not knew I was using windows. Hell, I could not even start a computer. It was really scary. However, if someone could open the "black screen" for me, I could write C++ programs for them. This was the state for a long time. I was proud of myself thinking I could do anything in C++ but had no clue how to reach that black screen. I say anything as I was easily able to understand concept of pointer and templates and was even able to do graphics code. I thought I was awesome back then in year 2000. How about you? Edit: The sole purpose of this post is to feel young. ;P
I wrote a sorting program on a Flexowriter and fed the paper tape it into EDSAC 2 at Cambridge University c. 1963. All that I knew about computers was from popular reading about "electronic brains" and the lectures I received from Maurice Wilkes - great researcher but very boring teacher! So I guess I was pretty illiterate!
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...you wrote your first program? In my case, I had no idea what operating system is. I did not knew I was using windows. Hell, I could not even start a computer. It was really scary. However, if someone could open the "black screen" for me, I could write C++ programs for them. This was the state for a long time. I was proud of myself thinking I could do anything in C++ but had no clue how to reach that black screen. I say anything as I was easily able to understand concept of pointer and templates and was even able to do graphics code. I thought I was awesome back then in year 2000. How about you? Edit: The sole purpose of this post is to feel young. ;P
OK, if we skip over my TRS-80 Basic days, and some assembler, we get to my first C program. It was a port of an assembler for a dedicated terminal, to be written in C for an IBM PC. Now, at that time, Beyond "printf", I had know idea at all about the C standard library, particularly, I knew nothing about malloc & free, so everything was hard allocated as module level variables. I wrote at length about it before: http://herbsutter.com/2011/10/16/your-first-c-program/#comment-3822[^] I also dug up the source code to my SECOND major C program (circa 1989), and posted in on GitHub: https://github.com/jamescurran/HonestIllusion/tree/master/PCT[^]
Truth, James
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At school we would often find that the paper tape would tangle as it was feeding into the reader on the ASR33 (no hopper to contain the tape) so we would clip the tape into the reader then lead the tape across the room and open a window and drop the tape out - the computer room was on the 3rd floor - so that it wasn't all coiled up. As it fed out of the reader (low speed 110 baud phone line meant this was a tedious process) we would roll it back up by hand and store the tapes in pipe tobacco tins (conveniently, the computer science teacher smoked a pipe).
And as you hand fed the tape back into a roll you got paper cuts between your thumb and index finger! :laugh:
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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...you wrote your first program? In my case, I had no idea what operating system is. I did not knew I was using windows. Hell, I could not even start a computer. It was really scary. However, if someone could open the "black screen" for me, I could write C++ programs for them. This was the state for a long time. I was proud of myself thinking I could do anything in C++ but had no clue how to reach that black screen. I say anything as I was easily able to understand concept of pointer and templates and was even able to do graphics code. I thought I was awesome back then in year 2000. How about you? Edit: The sole purpose of this post is to feel young. ;P
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away... we technicians were allowed to learn some programming in our free time. Fortran and punch cards of course. So me and a buddy wrote a 'game of life' program that printed the generation patterns on a line printer. We destroyed several trees worth of paper. Now at 71, I still program for fun... (Win 7, C#, intel i7, almost no printing)
73
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And as you hand fed the tape back into a roll you got paper cuts between your thumb and index finger! :laugh:
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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The old VAX eh? THats even before my time! :) Sinclair Spectrum and the BBC were the first computers I came across. They were rare beasts before then, very rare.
The PDP was before the VAX, both by DEC. The PDP was the processor that gave birth to the C programming language. When I learned the MACRO-11 Assembler in High School, I did not realize I was learning C. The best ASSEMBLY EVER. Even though we had paper terminals. We had 3 "CRTs", which I quickly started using. Learning that the OS was just a program. That was the moment the light went on. We used RSTS/E Operating System, and by by the time I graduated High School, I had patched the OS in numerous ways (Hidden Files, bypassing NOLOGON) Crazy Times. But I learned how to do so much with that system. Oh, and in homage to VB programmers everywhere, this OS used BASIC Plus for almost all of the system library programs (Login, Logout). They did this by using a weird concept of Interrupts called System function calls. A$ = sys( chr$(6)+ "..." ) It took a single string, the first character was like the interrupt jump table byte (which function), and the rest of the string was parsed. So, 6 for system function, then like a 5 for Kill job, then the job number converted to a string. Really cool Radix50. Wow, that brought back too many memories from 1984-1985...
