What is your WHY in CODING?
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
When: In 1980, our high school was picked as one of the 'test' high schools in the province to have computers: 3 Commodore PETS - 16K models. Pretty much self-taught on Commodore BASIC and then 6502 Assembler. Why: I had taken a data processing course before where we studied the history of computers, then, in the last term, we wrote programs using mark-sense cards. That peaked my interest. From there... it was college and over 30 years of professional work.
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
I started in high school back in 1979 when I was a junior. We had three teletypes connected via modem (rotary dial phones and acoustic couplers) to the minicomputers across town at UND. The actual computers were a PDP-8 and a PDP-12 and we were learning BASIC. They wouldn't let us save anything on the computers but the teletypes were able to punch holes in paper tapes and read them. In my senior year they actually got an Apple II. I spent a lot of time in the computer lab and found that I really liked working with the computers. After I graduated from high school we moved down to Florida and I went to college. I just really enjoyed working with computers and I was able to get paid doing it as well. It's always nice when you can get paid for doing something that you like doing.
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
I saw a computer at a trade fair when I was a child and even it was green letters in black background I had it clear I loved that... I started at an academy when I was 9... since then I've never stopped. I started professionally at 1998 (some years before I did small jobs in different companies but the first serious thing was 1998). I specialized in the industrial/mechanical environment where robots and special machines live... :cool:
www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming
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My first lines of codes were written in 1983 or 1984; at that time I had a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer, and the language was (extended) BASIC. Why? Because coding is just awesome :)
"I'm neither for nor against, on the contrary." John Middle
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
I started learning to code in 1977, when my stepfather bought a COSMAC ELF[^] single-board computer. It ran a 6502 processor with 2K of RAM. Our ELF was a deluxe model, and included a hex keypad for program entry. We found a Tiny BASIC interpreter that only took 1.5K of RAM. Adding a KSR-33 teletype gave us text I/O, and we were in business. I learned BASIC and wrote a lot of programs on that thing. For the "WHY", we have to go back a lot further to the early 60's. We always watched the Gemini and Apollo launches. While the launch itself was great, I was mainly fascinated by the control room video and the idea that such machines were controlled by people pushing buttons on a panel. I eventually learned about computers being at the heart of things, and it's been all downhill ever since :-D.
Software Zen:
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Yup. I'm with you, Phil. I played around with a Timex Sinclair a little before that. Being able to build things was the hook that got me.
Around these years there was a publication dedicated to computer code called Hebdogiciel. In it you could find codes for various computer systems like HP41, PC 1251, PC1500, TRS 80, Thomson TO7/MO8, MZ 80, TI-99/4A, Apple IIc/e, ZX 81, Sinclair, Spectrum, Commodore, ORIC 1/ ATMOS, Alice, Atari 520/1024 ST, and I surely forgot some. All these names still ring the bell of nostalgia to me.
"I'm neither for nor against, on the contrary." John Middle
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Yup. I'm with you, Phil. I played around with a Timex Sinclair a little before that. Being able to build things was the hook that got me.
Here a small sample code for SPECTRUM found in my archives:
1 REM **MUSHROOM** SPECTRUM 48K: REM PE et H CELLARD:
2 GO SUB 800: LET ba=0
3 DIM h$(5,3): FOR x=1 TO 5: LET h$(x)="AAA": NEXT x
4 DIM h(5): LET hsc=10: FOR x=1 TO 5: LET h(x)=0: NEXT X
5 BORDER 1: LET a$="A": LET c$=" "
6 LET t=15: LET pa=3: LET te=.4: LET b$="I": LET ni=0
..."I'm neither for nor against, on the contrary." John Middle
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
1980, Commodore 64s and a TRaSh-80 in math class, 11th grade. It was fun. Wrote an Asteroids style game on the 64. It was crude and sooooo slooooow but cheaper than 25 cents for the real thing! Now I do programming for the money and it's still fairly fun. Outside of work, I don't much like computers.
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
About 1975 and I thought it would be a useful skill as computers were going to be everywhere. Started on a dial up to the local university, with BASIC. My school had a teletype that we used to communicate with the HP mini at the OU. Later we built a Nascom.
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
When I give a computer something it doesn't like, it tells me clearly and plainly what I did wrong, and when I fix it, it doesn't hold a grudge. I'm (a bit) autistic, so this is the only time I _really_ feel like I have some sort of connection with something.
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
When: 1979, High School What: Ohio Scientific Challenger II microcomputer, BASIC Why: Video games were COOL even if the best that could be achieved was a CARET firing a PERIOD at an X! Result: College degrees, but never published a game. I'm more DBA than coder these days, but it has been a fascinating journey that I have loved and continue to love everyday!
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
I wrote a FORTRAN program in high school to calculate chess moves. It was an eight-level nested loop. My Dad had to punch it in cards to run on an IBM 360. Somehow, he came up with the program needing more seconds to run than there are atoms in the universe. From there I went on to learn IBM 360 machine and assembly language and got access to a large mainframe to make the bell ring. My WHY is that computers were cool, and might somehow help me with physics to build my flying saucer. Later, the WHY was changed to helping our country be more of a democracy than a republic, then changed to simply manage work flow in offices. Now, my WHY is to keep my health care after retirement.
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
I started with a commodore 64 and basic, moved to a Tandy with basic. Maybe 1980? I was fascinated and took all the basic programming classes in Junior High and High School. Majored in Math in college and took all the programming classes they offered, all the guys in the class were spending 20-30 completely the Pascal coding assignments at one point and it was just so easy for me. I loved it! In those days I was the only girl in the class, but I grew up on a construction site working for my dad. I was in my zone! Programming was a big puzzle and still is, and yelling at the code when it doesn't do what I want is a bonus... because that just means I need to figure out what I am actually telling it to do. I stay a programmer because I love the challenge!
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
1973 - HP 2000C timeshare on an ASR-33 terminal. I loved the Star Trek game and wanted to learn how to create my own. Went over to the University Bookstore in LaCrosse, WI and bought the programming reference manual. We had 8k of ram and 100k of program storage and kept our own programs on punched paper tape. Still have the Star Trek game on a roll of punched paper tape.
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My first lines of codes were written in 1983 or 1984; at that time I had a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer, and the language was (extended) BASIC. Why? Because coding is just awesome :)
"I'm neither for nor against, on the contrary." John Middle
Oh the memories. I bought my Timex Sinclair with Paper Route Money, had it for 1 week, and returned it to Kmart! Went for the TI/94-A eventually with a PEB. I worked with my buddy who was into music, and I wrote software that played Christmas songs. I learned enough about music that I could setup the DATA to be (Note,time) pairs so I could READ It out loud and he could match it to the sheet music, and vice versa (I could type as he read). We must have done his entire book of Christmas songs... I had a Radio Shack Model I (That I bought used, and the seller ripped me off, selling me a broken floppy drive... I was just a kid... Who does that to a kid?). The TRS-80 Came out, and we learned to forcibly change the master password on ANY Floppy: - Insert your disk, choose change master password - Enter your current password - Prompt for new password - Swap disks with the TARGET disk - Type new password, press enter: Writes password over other password without checking. LOL. My buddy got a PC (with a floppy only). HDs wire like 5MB back then... Too expensive. We wired up an Analog to Digital Converter to the serial port, from the HAM Radio output he had. And in the course of a day, we wrote code that converted the Morse Code to text on the screen, adapting for speed dynamically! This was all in High School, Circa 1982-1985... Then we got into the DEC PDP/11 running RSTS/E and BASIC-PLUS running the main Runtime/OS. (Most programs for the entire operating system were written in BASIC PLUS!). We also had COBOL and Fortran to learn, as well as Assembler (which matched the C syntax wonderfully, I would learn later on when I took to C like a fish to water!) I spent 8-10hrs/day, 6 days a week at school, in the computer room my Junior and Senior year. When I found out that they PAID PEOPLE to do this (as I was getting brought in to install and fix things), I was blown away. When I found out they PAID WELL for these skills... I grew a perma grin! There is a certain amount of empowerment knowing at a young age (15-16) what you want to do for the rest of your life! I feel bad for people who are still looking AFTER college! Find something you LOVE doing, and then find someone stupid enough to pay you to do it! LOL
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
I learned to program on a HP 2115 minicomputer whose primary IO methods were paper tape and a teletype. One evening while trying to get something to work, I typed "why" at the command prompt. The computer replied "Why not". Since HP published the source code for the basic OS (HP Assembly Language), I dove in to see if I could find where "why" was being parsed as a legal command. As I remember, it was very well obfuscated using octal constants for both data and executable code. I guess I'll have to go with the HP2115's answer to the question Why? Why not!
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
In 1978 at college I made my first contact with a computer and programming language, BASIC. I didn't get it, failed. Then in 1980 at a different college I took a FORTRAN class, got the technical aspect of it, aced all the tests, but had to use punch cards to produce programs, which was a pain, so I 'borrowed' punch card stacks. Again, didn't really get into the whole computer and programming thing. Jump forward to 1986, after changing schools again and changing majors from Aeronautical Engineering to Electrical Engineering to Architecture to Art to Forestry then to Jewery/Silversmithing, thru a few part time jobs, in and out of college then back in, I came to the realization that my brother graduated in CompSci and was making good coin. So my whole reasoning for jumping back into CompSci/programming was "If my brother can do it and make money then I can to." No other reason. So I reluctantly jumped back in, had courses in BASIC, Pascal, Assembler on DEC-PDP11 w/ giant floppy disks, C, but what really REALLY hooked me was a graphics class using Turbo Pascal on a PC. I could visibly see results from my coding efforts. So after 10 years of wandering the planet I finally graduated in 1988 in CompSci, and now 30 years later, I still code C/C++, creating data entry tools that generate code for others so they don't have to. Which is really sad they miss out on programming but that's a whole new topic...
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
Apple ][ with Apple BASIC -- Why? Because there were almost no useful programs then; it was the pre-VisiCalc era. Then I added a CPM card and a roaring-loud hard disk drive the size of a shoe box. Followed that with Compaq PC, Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo Prolog.
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When did you first learn to code and why? I learned in 2012 and my WHY is to hopefully be successful one day in helping millions.
I was stationed in Italy from 86 to 90 (Vicenza, airborne infantry) when I found Tandy computers at the PX. I bought one with two floppy drives and the disk had gwbasic on it. I started messing around with it and reading everything I could about working with computers and programming. I haven't stopped yet. Being able to get the computer to do something makes it worthwhile.