How much computer illiterate were you when...
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My buddy who got me started on computers had given me the book on assembler programming a PDP-8. For two weeks I struggled, trying to understand registers, opcodes, and binary. He and his buddy took me to the computer center and while he was off doing something on another computer, his buddy says, "Psst, wanna write a program?" He started FOCAL and had me type
1.1 Type "HELLO."
Now type "GO" and press Return. It printed
HELLO
I yelled, "THAT'S IT? That's all I have to do?!?" And I was off to the races.
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.
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Peter Grogono wrote:
reading about "electronic brains"
I have this book, "Electronic Brains" written in 1945 in my library. It states the estimated worldwide market for computers was for maybe as many as five of them.
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.
The book I remember best was "Faster than Thought", edited by B V Bowden and published in 1953. I was about 12 when I read it and I did not understand very much!
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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
James Curran wrote:
I had know idea at all
Phonetically correct, but contextually incorrect.
correct:
I had no idea at all
Someone else wrote "I now that..." which is both phonetically and contextually incorrect. I have no idea why I didn't feel compelled to correct him two(sic) (There is so much trampling of the English language, I had to get into the act.)
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Peter Grogono wrote:
reading about "electronic brains"
I have this book, "Electronic Brains" written in 1945 in my library. It states the estimated worldwide market for computers was for maybe as many as five of them.
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.
IP addresses were defined much later, so it's capacity is much greater than 5. When it was defined it was determined it would have all the communication addresses computers would ever need. Shows how good we humans are at capacity planning when it comes to computers.
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Does knowing to draw a diagonal line across the card deck count so the code still ran after dropping it on the floor?
In this day when downloads under 1MBS is slow, I wonder how many people know that a card deck box could only hold about 40K. (500 cards, 80 bytes per card. Oh yeah signed bytes, 9 holes per byte) Many full length programs were less than half a box or reading half a box could take over 10 seconds
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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
A few lines of Fortran in 1966 to calculate pi to 100 places on a CDC 3200 using the ArcTan expansion which I'd just learned. Most digits were zero, so I learned something about precision.
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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 just full of awesomeness when I wrote a complete calculator emulator (complete with transcendent functions) using CDL (Computer Design Language) running on a CDC Cyber 74 mainframe back in 1977. I aced that class. The prof said he didn't believe I could pull it off it had never been done before. It did cost me an F in all my other courses that quarter but it sure was worth it! :) Edit: Oh, you said how ILLITERATE was I ... OK, I didn't yet know what a CRT terminal was. I wrote the whole thing using an 029 keypunch, card reader (of course) and line printer.
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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
1986 I was 3, wrote a batch file to display hello world, I understood that the operating system was called disk os aka DOS because I had to load the floppy's one at a time as the computer loaded as there were no hard drives. Everyone before the year 2000 grew up with the technology and understand it before we use it.
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I should say I wanted to feel young. I have no clue what you all are blabbering about. I wan't even born at that time.
http://www.c64-wiki.de/index.php/COMMODORE_plus/4_ROM-LISTING[^] Note: I only now realized the comments were actually in german, and that there apparently was no equivalent book in english. Would explain why you didn't know about it - putting the being born thingy aside ;)
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto) Point in case: http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/02/apple_gotofail_lessons[^]
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I was just full of awesomeness when I wrote a complete calculator emulator (complete with transcendent functions) using CDL (Computer Design Language) running on a CDC Cyber 74 mainframe back in 1977. I aced that class. The prof said he didn't believe I could pull it off it had never been done before. It did cost me an F in all my other courses that quarter but it sure was worth it! :) Edit: Oh, you said how ILLITERATE was I ... OK, I didn't yet know what a CRT terminal was. I wrote the whole thing using an 029 keypunch, card reader (of course) and line printer.
029 keypunch? That were looxury! We had 026s only.
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029 keypunch? That were looxury! We had 026s only.
Well, at Ga Tech we had both, but the 029's were, of course, the first ones taken! ;)
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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
Windows was something you looked through when I wrote my first program, which was in FORTRAN, punched in cards and run on an IBM/360. I knew something about the operating system and assembler and bytes and bits and Boolean. My Dad was designing a home computer with transistors on printed circuit boards and showed his design to me.
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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
In very old times (when I was about six years old) I didn't know what is. We had http://www.pravetz.info/pravetz-8c.html[^] (information on the page is wrong, memory was 64KB of which 16KB was reserved for ROM, so there was only 48KB usable). There was three way to use that computer: 1. As user, you load 5.25" diskette in the floppy drive and it shows a bunch of programs - some of them games. 2. There was an interpreter for GW-BASIC language. 3. Program in machine language. Not assembly, you must write bytes in hex notation at specific address. You can list the bytes as instruction later. What I know (at six) about mathematics was sum and subtract one-digit numbers and due to my curiosity I was taught how to sum and subtract two digit number and the method of multiply by hand (but I didn't know the whole multiplication table). I didn't know what statement, or command, or assembly, or instruction, or programming was.
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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
That's an easy one, didn't have to do much, just plug my ZX80 into a black and white portable TV, switch it on and there was Sinclair basic ready to start typing in. From that point on, for the first few months at least I just copied in magazine & type your own adventure book listings, till I eventually started to learn the syntax and could type my own stuff. Keyboard was a nightmare though. :-) Shawty