First experience of programming
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COBOL, gawd help me. On a ICL 1900 running George 3, on punch cards, with operators who actively (and for good reason) hated students. You'd get your deck back with bits of lettuce stuck to them, half of someone else's program upside down, and a core dump two feet thick. The lecherer (for he was indeed a lecherous sod) allowed three attempts to get your code working: three deck submissions. After that, you lost 10% of available points for each run. Following term was FORTRAN and a breath of fresh air.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
"ICL 1900 running George 3, on punch cards" Didn't they name a king after that OS? At least that's what a school maths club asked as part of my first programming experiences using hand punched cards, pressing out each chad with a stylus on an IBM Port-a-Punch, using every second column, and posting the Algol (IIRC) code off to Leeds University (c 1969) (I think it was George 4 by then - A better king?). The punch, post, compile, run, printout cycle too a whole week! We learnt to check our code and the cards. Primes up to 1000, integer Pythagorean triangles, etc. Great stuff.
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First professional experience was PL/I on IBM 360/95 modeling heat flow through a nuclear reactor core section and Assembly language on a HP 2116 at Argonne National Laboratory in 1968 for data collection. Then went to work for GTE after Nixon got elected and axed R&D budgets where I was programming the IBM 1800 in Assembly and a touch of Fortran II. Modified the be-dickens out of the 1800 MPX operating system including writing a printer spooling system, developing support for the 2314 disk drives, bi-sync communications to IBM 370/158 and 168, and developing real time multi-programming/multi-tasking OS'es including assemblers for Data General Nova and GTE Tempo II computer, all while going to night school at IIT and studying languages such as Lisp and Univac 1108 assembly language. Managed to get married, buy and remodel a house and have 3 kids. I'm not sure if I ever slept.
Not trying to top you all but in 1963 I went to work at the University of B.C. as an operator on an IBM1620. I learned to program in assembler and FORTRAN 1a. FORTRAN was a 2 pass compiler. you would load pass 1 by cards followed by your program followed by pass 2 followed by your program again. I also monitored the ALWAC III a machine with mercury delay memory. We finally upgraded to an IBM7040 with mag tapes and a disk drive the size of a commercial refrigerator. By then I was a systems programmer. I've been through many languages such as algol, B, Basic(several), C, C++, COBOL, JAVA, Lisp, Pascal, PL1, and many assemblers. Worked with various machines from IBM, Honeywell, Intel(Microsoft et al), Digital Equipment, RCA, CDC. I'm now retired and write in C for my own pleasure for windows, Raspberry Pi, arduino. Fortran was the most fun.
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So - we have done the age thing, so how about the experience thing? In 1960 I was given a Heathkit EC-1 in kit form by a rich relo. I built it, and then programmed it to solve very simply calculus problems, with the output sent to a Heathkit oscilloscope - it was an analog machine! Then there was an eight year gap until university, an IBM 1130 and Algol.
A PC games magazine published readers' games on the pack-in-CD. Some of them were written in QBasic with the QBasic interpreter attached. That got me started (and I even got a creation of mine published).
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Lots of interesting replies. Here's mine. We had a Computer Club at my grammar school in 1966 run by one of the science teachers. We learnt about binary numbers & how computers (at that time) worked. We had some type of primitive system that was collectively programmed to solve simple math/logic problems and show the answers in binary using lights on or off. My first real programming experience was learning Fortran at the end of 2nd year Civ. Eng. degree in 1969. For some unknown reason, after the exams we had a 2 week course each morning waiting for exam results to be published. Needless to say, we spent most of our time partying & so often had less than clear heads in the morning. For the first couple of days of the Fortran course I couldn't make any sense of it. How could i = i + 1? Then it suddenly clicked & I was hooked. The next year I did my 3rd year project programming a simulation of a water resources system to optimize withdrawals from different sources to meet the demand from a nearby city. It was punched cards which were delivered to the Computer Dept. on the other side of campus. If you submitted by 11am, you got your print out the next day. If not you had to wait until the day after. From there I moved to Canada to do a Masters including a thesis developing/programming a deterministic conceptual hydrologic model. This led to a 40+ year career as a water resources consulting engineer doing computer modelling. At first, we did lots of programming but eventually pre-packaged models took over so I kept up my interest as a recreational programmer with a C64, etc. learning various languages, etc. continuing up to today.
Wow. In all my years of programming (since 1974), I never had a problem with I=I+1. Maybe it was the way it was taught - as an assignment, not as a mathematical identity. When I read your post, my first reaction was, why didn’t that bother me at the time? Not enough imagination, I guess.
