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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-little-bit-at-a-time? dept.

With the recent brouhaha about vulnerabilities in many relatively recent processors, I got to thinking back to the time when I first started programming. Back then, things seemed so much simpler and much more straightforward.

To start off the new year, I thought it might be interesting to find out how people got their start in programming.

My first exposure to programming was by means of a Teletype over a dialup line using an acoustical coupler to a PDP-8 computer running TSS/8 and which had 24 KB of RAM. At the time, Star Trek ToS was on the air, and I thought this was the new, big thing. I was quickly disappointed by it not measuring up to anything like what I saw on TV, but I saw it had promise. Started with BASIC (and FOCAL). Later on was exposed to a PDP-11 running RSTS/E and programmed in BASIC+ as well as some Pascal.

As for owning a computer, the first one I bought was an OSI[*] Challenger 4P with a whopping 4KB of RAM!

From those humble beginnings, I ate up everything I could lay my hands on and later worked for a wide variety of companies that ranged in size from major internationals to tiny startups. Even had a hand in a project for Formula 1!

So, my fellow Soylentils, how did you get started programming? Where has it taken you?

[*] One day when my girlfriend came over and saw the OSI logo on my computer her eyes got huge! You see, The Six Million Dollar Man was on television at that time, and she suddenly suspected I was connected to the "Office of Scientific Intelligence"!


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:36PM

    by Freeman (732) on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:36PM (#617933) Journal

    I remember my first foray in computer programming was as a very young school kid when my parents got a (IBM?) computer with a Orange Monochrome screen. It had a 5 1/4" floppy drive, a 3.5" floppy drive with No Hard Drive. Everything just booted off whatever disk you had in the drive. They got some computer game program book, I typed the program in and played the game. That's what eventually led me into a Computer degree at the University I attended. I ended up working at a Library, but have recently picked up programming again. Played some with Visual Studio and C#, but have switched to Python for the latest projects.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
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