Code Project goes to 11
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I'm actually an engineer, somewhat like Roger mentioned above. I started coding in about 1967 (IBM 1620 assembly), learned FORTRAN in 1968, got a Grader job in college doing FORTRAN, then paid my way working as Research Assistant coding numerical reservoir simulators and hydrocarbon phase behavior calculations in FORTRAN. Fortunately I had the good fortune to work along side a CS grad student named Eric Griggs who showed me lots, opened up a whole new world, and I stumbled upon Algol in about 1972 or so. That piqued my interest in programming as more than a way to earn enough to pay tuition, room and board. In grad school I also started doing some real-time programming on minis to control oil field processes. After grad school I went to work doing engineering (with a slide rule!), but when programmable calculators came along, I was one of the first in line and realized that I could apply some of the CS stuff I had picked up to making them jump through hoops for engineering calculations. I solved PDE's and published an engineering paper based on my numerical solutions done on a TI-59 (that still works, BTW). When PC's came along, I wanted to get a FORTRAN compiler, but they were too expensive, so I learned Turbo Pascal, which was easy after learning Algol. I also learned Z80 and TMS9900 assembly, Basic, Forth, C, C++, Prolog, Delphi, and a few other languages. All of this was mostly done beating my head against the wall with books, since I knew no real programmers and there was no interweb. In 1991 I left employment and, since the oil business was in bad shape, I started programming for a living, as well as doing some engineering consulting. I managed to find a nice niche doing technical software, AI, and assorted related things for a variety of industries. Finally someone wanted to buy one of the programs I wrote for my own use as a consultant in the oil business, so I started doing more software development. Still no interwebs, so I was still pretty much on my own, but I did start to study CS more thoroughly. Fast forward to when .NET was established and I decided to learn how to use it and convert all my engineering apps to .NET. By this time I was working in Venezuela and still no one to really learn from. I found CP while Googling around for information and I used the info quietly for a year or two, then realized how nice the group here was and how much I had learned and benefited from "reading the mail," so finally I decided that maybe it was time to try and contribute. Since I had been mostly on m
Walt Fair, Jr. wrote:
I started coding in about 1967 (IBM 1620 assembly
Wow! Someone else who coded on the IBM1620! My first access to that machine (using a crippled Fortran called Gotran) was late in 1965 at Juniata College in Huntingdon PA. I moved up :laugh: to assembly in 1966. Our math prof had a random packing experiment which took about 80 hours to complete. When Penn State got their IBM 360, he requested some machine time. At first he thought it hadn't run because it finished so quickly. When he got the bill (and the results) he found that it had worked and had taken only a few CPU seconds to complete!
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Walt Fair, Jr. wrote:
I started coding in about 1967 (IBM 1620 assembly
Wow! Someone else who coded on the IBM1620! My first access to that machine (using a crippled Fortran called Gotran) was late in 1965 at Juniata College in Huntingdon PA. I moved up :laugh: to assembly in 1966. Our math prof had a random packing experiment which took about 80 hours to complete. When Penn State got their IBM 360, he requested some machine time. At first he thought it hadn't run because it finished so quickly. When he got the bill (and the results) he found that it had worked and had taken only a few CPU seconds to complete!
We had a similar experience. Our High School made arrangements with the local Jr. College for some of us to use the 1620, so we learned GOTRAN, wrote a simple program, tehn went out to the college to put it on punch cards and try to run them. Unfortunately the computer memory/disk was so small that they didn't have the compiler. So we went back to class and learned assembly.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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It's Dobly, not Doubly. I used Code Guru and then someone mentioned CP, so I followed the link and never left.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
I came in the same way as Christian. i was teaching a windows programming class when CodeProject started and made sure to tell the students to sign up for CodeProject right away once it opened up.
Steve Maier