How did you get hooked onto programming ?
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
I got a late start because I kind of just fell into it. I took a programming class in high school (GW Basic), but I hated it. Later, in college, as part of the Electrical Engineering curriculum, I had to take a C programming class. I thought it was pretty cool, so that summer I took a C++ class. After that, I was hooked, and I switched to Computer Engineering so that I could get more of a programming emphasis with my degree. There was really no single project that made me love it. I had done manual, mundane labor in my teenage years, and I absolutely hated it. I was so bored. In programming, I think the biggest draw for me was the ability to be creative in solving problems. I guess I could say the same about any field that requires problem solving, but at least with programming I get to play with computers all day. :)
Jon Sagara I said NO salt, NO salt on my margarita!!
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
my mom bought me a zx spectrum, and i was writing some games for it in BASIC and man it was f:laugh:un, just the thought of me typing created fun games, thats how.:laugh: --------------------------
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
My Dad was into playing around with our TRS-80. I[t] must have rubbed off on me. I did some programming, but didn't really get into it until high school, when my friend and I would write text adventures for each other to play. I went through some denial about being a computer geek, but eventually embraced it. Actually, I'd say until recently programming was just work. Something I took too, but didn't care enough to get into it. Something changed recently, though, and I'm elbows deep in reading whatever I can get my mitts on. I probably have CP to thank for that. :) BW
I want pancakes! God, do you people understand every language except English?
Yo quiero pancakes. Donnez moi pancakes. Click click, bloody click pancakes!
-- Stewie Griffin -
Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
My first love was hardware, but in the 70's it was a bit expensive for a 12 year old kid to goof around with. So I found that my second great love was the PDP-11 computer on the third floor of the school I went to (Hamden Hall, in CT). I fell in love with programming (good ol' BASIC on a teletype with a mag tape for the OS and punch tape for storage, and 64KB of RAM, woohoo!). It was also something my father couldn't relate to. Everything else, he was pretty much a major control freak, to the point of rewriting my book reports because he didn't like how I wrote them. It was impossible for him to let a kid just be a kid. I remember one time, he made me write a book report the way he wanted it done, completely opposite of how the teacher expressly wanted it written. The result was that the teacher held up a book report with a big fat "D" on it, said "this is exactly what I didn't want", and handed it to me. I hated my father, I hated my English teacher (a Dr. Hyde, BTW). But I digress... So, I got into hardware and software because my father couldn't relate and therefore couldn't control what I was doing. And after that, I discovered it was easy to write cool software and make cool money doing something I love! [edit]After doing some programming in BASIC in the Commodore PET, I moved on to 6502 assembly language and then half a dozen others. I still think assembly language is the best programming language of all![/edit] Marc My website
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
Simply put games. As a school kid I'd shove every penny I could lay my hands on into space invaders and galaxian. I was even known to walk to the nearest town with an arcade in it just to spend a pound in arcades during the summer holidays. That's six miles each way. Years later when I finally got the chance to learn programming I just viewed it as another type of computer game and still do when doing my own stuff. Business requirements tended to put a damper on that outlook at work though. Just this moment shut down Guild Wars.:-D Oh yeah and I'd forgotten all about MSAV as well, mind you I haven't done anything at the command prompt for years. Probably forgotten most of it now. pseudonym67 My Articles[^] "They say there are strangers who threaten us, In our immigrants and infidels. They say there is strangeness too dangerous In our theaters and bookstore shelves. That those who know what's best for us Must rise and save us from ourselves." Rush
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
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
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
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)
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
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.
"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
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
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.
"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
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
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 -
Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
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.
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
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) :)
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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.
"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
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 -
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 PatternHa! 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.
"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
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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 PatternMarc 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.
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
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.
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Today, evening, the neighbour's 12 (?) year old kid comes upto me with a DOS 6.22 book and asks me how to set up his CONFIG.SYS properly.. The reason why he wanted to use that DOS is really very interesting and I should blog about it sometime, but it brought back pleasant ol' memories from my own nerdy childhood ;) I was hooked onto computers not by games initially, but by batch file programming and later on, ANSI.SYS... (as my memory serves ?) and even the c00l things you could do with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ! Now I fail to recall why I found batch programming so much fun (maybe because you had to purchase GW-BASIC ? was that it ?), but I found using escape sequences and colorful stuff you could do with ANSI.SYS pretty amazing.. Infact, now I remember that PC Mag. (?) carried a full article by Charles Petzold on formatting the command prompt and stuff like that.. Norton's book on DOS programming during that time sold like the VB.NET guides of today... Memories... (but it's killing me that I can't recall why I didn't start with GW-BASIC ? Did the 5.25inch floppies from which you had to boot DOS have BASIC ? Don't think so - MS sold BASIC by ANOTHER set of discs in a box - but correct me if I am wrong - so .BAT was the only thing the OS offered free).. DOS 6.22 really rocked man on 66MHz.. anybody remember MSAV.EXE ? History repeats itself - eh ? Enough about me - how did *you* get hooked ? "God then made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night" - Genesis 47:3
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
Luis Alonso Ramos Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico Not much here: My CP Blog!
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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 PatternMarc 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)