How did you get hooked onto programming ?

[Toby Opferman]

I got into computers because of the Texas Instruments we had in 3rd grade. They had the Apollo and the Turtle! I wanted one but instead I got a Tandy 1000 EX for Christmas. In later years I had heard that those TI's were popular because people saw them in schools, but basically junk and thrown away a few years later. The funny thing was that the computer was for free. Apparently, my parents had stayed after hours looking at computers and when they bought it thier system never recorded the sale so they never had to pay for it. In any case, the first thing I wanted to do was draw or make games. I somehow found GW BASIC/BASICA/Tandy BASIC instead of a paint program. I ended up going to the store and bought some "BASIC For Tandy Computers" book and just started plugging away at that. It was definately a kid's programming book, they had a guy and his dog programming and talking to the computer in little skits. I still have the book actually. So that's how it all started... An 8088 with 256kb, 5 1/4" floppy and TGA Graphics! (Looked like EGA for games that supported it but was not compatible with EGA!). I still have all the old "Public Domain" games and software that were basically written in people's basements :) 8bc7c0ec02c0e404c0cc0680f7018827ebee

[Yulianto]

It was my only toy.:)

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Work hard, Work effectively.

[El Corazon]

Let's see... in high school, a friend of mine was a Senator's son, for Christmas or birthday, forget which, he got a TRS-80 computer. The first one in town (the banker's son got a Timex Sinclair shortly thereafter). Suddenly there were two home computers in a small town, games, and basic programming ability. Mark and Tim both wanted to learn Basic to write their own stuff, so they both hired me to teach them; I didn't have a computer, but I did have a knack for picking things up from a book. So without access to the TRS-80, I took the book home and taught myself Basic, a week later I started teaching Mark how to program his TRS-80 and Tim how to program his Timex Sinclair. And I was hand-coding my own programs in a notebook (as in paper and pen). About a month later I was adding graphical ability to a text-only game for the TRS-80. After that I started saving all the money I could get to buy my own computer. Before Mark got his TRS-80, I was deeply set for career as an astronomer. After an hour of the manual for Basic on the TRS-80, I had already decided on a career as a computer programmer. _________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

[Member 96]

The Lunar lander game on a programmable calculator circa 1979 or so. It was all numbers but you could mess with the gravity, fuel etc. Years later I finally got my own computer a Radio Shack TRS-80 colour computer with an assembly language cartridge and a casette drive. I had my own space invaders game programmed with voice input via the casette port for moving left or right and firing about 3 months later and swore I would be a games programmer. Unfortunately all I ever write is business software, but it pays the bills and it's interesting in it's own way.

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"In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office." - Ambrose Bierce

[Member 96]

Seems like more than a few of us got started on Radio Shack specials. I thought everyone would answer the apple II or Acorn or something.

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"In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office." - Ambrose Bierce

[Paul Lyons]

For me it was a TRS-80 then an Apple II. I started programming text based games in basic and that was it. Been a major GEEK ever since. :-D

Paul Lyons, CCPL
Certified Code Project Lurker

[Michael A Barnhart]

Kamal Shankar wrote: How did you get hooked onto programming ? More dreaming about what I can solve with it and the accuracy it had, versus my slide rule, was just awesome. Although my first practical exposure was not a fun time at all and caused a few years skip. Never did like probability, so doing programming and data entry for mortality calculations was some what of a downer. The plus was the WANG 720 actually used magnetic tape versus the paper tape the high schools machine was limited to. Ahh the fun times. By college time it was also the challenges of memory utilization of a single tape drive. Unless you really had a large paying research assistantship job, you could only afford to rent time on a single drive. So you had to keep track of what segments of the tape could be written to / over written and which would hold the arrays of data you had to keep to read back latter in the program. I do not mind getting old. It beats all the other options that can think of.

[Lost User]

MS-DOS 2.11 was way cooler :) This was the 1st version of DOS I worked with, on a Tandy 1000 computer. My previous (and first) computer was a Tandy TRS-80 Coco 3. I remember coding birthday cards with flashing colors and music for my mom in good ol' Basic. Of course, I always remembered to save my code on the tape deck (which quite frankly, didn't work very well) :)

[Marc Clifton]

John Cardinal wrote: I thought everyone would answer the apple II or Acorn or something. Ew. Apple, the enemy! Trash-80 was, well, the name said it all. The best machine was the Commodore PET!!! :-D Marc My website
Latest Articles: Undo/Redo Buffer Memento Design Pattern

[Member 96]

Ha! In high school I learned basic on a Commodore SuperPet! That's where I became a life long devotee of bright green text on a black background.

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"In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office." - Ambrose Bierce

[Michael A Barnhart]

Marc Clifton wrote: The best machine was the Commodore PET!!! For 80's I thought the Dec Rainbow was nice. You had your choice of CP-M or DOS, it was rather pricey. I do not mind getting old. It beats all the other options that can think of.

[Roy Heil]

My high school didn't have its' own computer (this was in the '70s), just two TTY's with modems. We also didn't have any computer programming classes. I was pretty good in Math, and one time our Math teacher started teaching us BASIC. Then he assigned a program for us to write to print out a trig chart. He said we would get extra credit if we could get it down to 9 lines of code. He gave us all of the BASIC commands we needed, but not all we needed to do it in 9 lines. He did say that all the concepts we needed, we had already covered in class. After writing the program in 11 lines, I search through the math book, looking for something that could help cut down on the algorithm, and eventually found a discussion on integral values. I asked the teacher about that, and he gave me the INT function. I was the first to get the program down to 9 lines. Later, after I moved away from home, my roommate got a TRS-80, and a modem, which he used to dial in to the mainframe where he worked, and do some work at home. They also had some games in BASIC on the mainframe, so we would play those. One game was a dungeon game. Unfortunately, one of the rooms that we needed to pass through had a bug in it, and when we went through one of the doors, the game crashed. SOOOOO .... One weekend when my roommate was at work (boy, that's dedication), I used his computer, dialed into their system, and downloaded the source code. I then started debugging it. When I found the bug, I dialed in again, fixed the bug, and played the game, happily getting past the room that had frustrated us for so long. (Note: This was the first and only time I ever took this kind of liberty with a companies computer system and software, and I don't advocate doing it now). From that moment, I was hooked. I changed my major to CSci, got hooked on Turbo Pascal, then C++, Delphi, and now C# and VB.Net Roy.

[Luis Alonso Ramos]

My dad bought Microsoft GameShop for me when I was about 10. It consisted of about 5 QBasic games, the QBasic Interpreter and a book Learn BASIC Now. The first program I remember writing was a little GUESS game which asked the user to guess a number and said if it was lower or higher than the secret number. I remember seeing the file stamped Dec. 25th, 1991 and being exactly 1000 bytes long. The second version used the RND function to get the secret number (yes, the first time it was hardcoded to 33.) Later I got a book on C (K&R 2nd edition, with the date handprinted, January 1992). And from then on, everything else is history :) -- LuisR

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Luis Alonso Ramos Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico Not much here: My CP Blog!

[El Corazon]

Marc Clifton wrote: Ew. Apple, the enemy! Hey!!! That was my first computer... I saved for a year, working my fingers to the bone, working my wrist into a bone graft. :) I actually wanted a Commodore PET, I forget the reason why I couldn't -- it was far too long ago. For some reason, either availability, or some other reason long forgotten, my choice was PC or Apple, the Apple ][+ was $1k less at that time and was the exact amount of money I had saved at that time (as in exact, not enough for tax). I remember I was very disappointed in not being able to get a PET, but I survived anyway -- and with only minor brain damage. _________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

[eggie5]

I wanted to change my grades on Mrs. Decker's computer. /\ |_ E X E GG

[Nish Nishant]

I am not hooked onto programming. It's just my job + my hobby, that's all. :)

[Roger Wright]

My school made me punch little rectangular holes in many pieces of cardboard, hand them off overnight to mysterious high priests in refrigerated rooms, and wait until reams of white and green paper appeared in a basket with my name on them; sometimes the holes caused interesting things to happen. I was moderately interested. Then I got a new job, and the company had a "computer." It had many front panel switches and LEDs, and was missing all the wires from the front panel to the motherboard. It was also missing all the documentation, as my predecessor apparently became distraught with his failed efforts to make it work and trashed the instructions and ripped out all the wires. I made it work. Then, because it wouldn't do much, I coded an operating system for it (in ones and zeroes) and designed a circuit to let it talk to an ASR33 teletype. Since it was still very hard to make it do anything, I then wrote an assembler for it to make programming a little easier. This was starting to look like fun. I got another job, designing hardware to test guidance systems of missiles. But the computers used to drive my electronics were too slow, so it became necessary to make the hardware smarter, and that required programming at low levels - playing God with electrons by means of assembly programs and writable control stores. It also meant learning a new O/S and language every few months as projects changed requirements and target platforms. This was definitely fun! Then Borland invented Turbo Pascal, and somebody came up with an O/S called CP/M that smelled an awful lot like the yet to be invented DOS; I was hooked.:-D Boredom, Bull$^%&, Baggage, Bar - all start with 'B'
Coincidence?

[Jorgen Sigvardsson]

And you can quit at any time? ;) -- An eye for an eye will only make the world blind.

[Ryan Binns]

Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote: And you can quit at any time? If somebody removes my brain, yes :)

Ryan

"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"

[jan larsen]

I started using my brothers Commodore VIC-20, after playing the games that came with the package, there wasn't much else to do than program the beast. I continued the adventures on my C64, and at that time I had reached puberty, so much of the time went with making woman shaped sprites flying around the screen :-D Actually I wasn't very good at programming, and I didn't have anyone nearby to help me getting further, so it was much later that I took it up professionally. "God doesn't play dice" - Albert Einstein "God not only plays dice, He sometimes throws the dices where they cannot be seen" - Niels Bohr