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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"!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:44PM (6 children)
I'm no coder - these days code-wise I just bash out occasional Autohotkey kludges - but anyway.... First computer and first machine I programmed on: A C64. Started with BASIC, ran into a performance wall, stumbled across a copy of Jim Butterfield's SuperMon somewhere, started doing assembly through that. Used that for years before running into a proper assembler. (Such an innovation not having to re-do all your jumps and branches every time you edited your code - or, more typically, not having to leave a ton of null padding for changes.)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dbe on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:56PM
Ha, but this is still done today: disabling "Incremental linking" in Visual studio will reduce your executable file size by half...
After looking at the binary content I saw that basically they had a whole bunch of 0 padding in there to avoid redoing most of the linking.
I guess it's better done by a tool than by hand though :)
-dbe
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tfried on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:56PM
The Archon, he? I see you were not in it for the programming, too much... Well, neither was I, but yes, the one thing that makes the C64 a distinct memory is how its ROM said "Hi there! How would you like to program me right now?" in a way that I did not ever see again in my personal history of computing.
The C64 was my first "real" computer, and my primary computer for at least four years straight. Unfortunately, thinking back to the (lack of) sophistication of the programming I did on it just makes me shudder today. Well, I guess we all started basic, even if it wasn't BASIC on the C64. But to me, programming will always start with "38911 Basic Bytes Free".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:58PM
Yeah C64 for me too. Well, I read some books first actually and got curious about it. I studied a little code that way, spent a week of "computer camp" one summer -- I can't remember what system. But then the first real experience was years messing around on a Commodore.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Friday January 05 2018, @01:01AM (1 child)
This is more or less my experience to, even tho I had started a bit earlier with the Sinclair 48k but it was mostly just typing things in from magazines and books and then wondering why it didn't work most of the time. Considering that it was mostly just complete pages filled with numbers I'm fairly sure that it was user error and I just typed something wrong somewhere. That I barely knew any English probably didn't help either. Sometimes they worked and that was marvelous. Then I slowly started to change things in then to just see what would happen. It was learning by doing until I found some books I could actually read and eventually I found the same book, I knew how to read by then.
The C64 eventually became an Amiga, and another one and another one and another one (the last one is boxed up and stored away). Same route there, Basic (written by Microsoft as I recall it, and it was horribly slow and things took forever to compile) so you just had to learn ASM as there was no substitute. I mostly used Amiga at home until probably the early 2000's. I didn't pick up C until probably the mid to late 90's when I was given access to the local university labs (this was also how I first got onto the Internet). So some C on the Sun Solaris Sparc stations (I grabbed a few of them when the uni was throwing them out years later -- they are still around here somewhere ... in boxes ... somewhere), and Perl. I worked some years just doing web stuff in the early 2000's and then I wrote some backend stuff and then I had just had enough.
I didn't like how things developed anymore, to many people involved, to many non-programmers telling me what to do, to many shitty new languages (*cough* JAVA *cough*), moving to Windows programming was just horrible coming from UNIX and Amiga. So I just stopped, went back to the University and started to do maths, statistics and social science and I'm still doing that. From time to time I still write or cobble together a little C program to solve some problem. But it's quite rare these days.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday January 05 2018, @07:42PM
If you were programming for fun, you still can, Get a Linux box. It's a lot like Unix. You can ignore the distracting modern fluff if you want, the core programmable system is still there. And X with a minimal window manager will do the kinds of things the Amiga used to do, and it'll even do it over a network if you want.
I graduated from an Amiga to Linux, now using Devuan linux on an almost ten-year-old machine. Great fun!
(Score: 4, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday January 05 2018, @01:17PM
In the '80s, the Thatcher government did a surprisingly good thing (very surprising, when measured against all of the other things that they did). They set up a programme to encourage schools to teach useful computer skills. This was done well, unlike later approaches of simply dumping money on schools to buy computers, and involved a lot of different components:
They defined a set of functionality that the computer must have (including a programming language with built-in support for structured programming) and asked companies to tender designs. Schools that bought any computers that met these criteria could claim half of the money back from central government. The winner of the competition was used in the educational material and allowed to carry the BBC branding. This machine was designed by Acorn and ran a dialect of BASIC designed mostly by Sophie (then Roger) Wilson. It had subroutines, typed variables, direct access to memory-mapped I/O devices via peek and poke, and even an integrated assembler.
They had the BBC produce a set of TV programmes explaining how to program the machines. These were shown early in the morning so that schools could record them and play them back for students, on the understanding that most schools didn't have any teachers that were competent to teach programming (most still don't).
Finally, they reserved a range of the BBC's teletext service to distribute the example materials overnight. You could get a tuner for the BBC and download example programs and so on and save them to disk or tape.
The whole setup was extremely well done. My school had a half-hour lesson each week called 'general' where headmaster taught whatever he thought was interesting. The first term, when I started there aged 7, was programming on the BBC. The school had three of them, but all in different rooms. We'd all go into the library where there was a big TV connected to the BBC so the whole class could see the screen, and he'd show us some simple programs and have us say what the next line should be. That was enough to get me interested in using the machines at break times, lunchtimes, and after school and eventually getting a computer at home that could be used for programming.
The following term, he taught ancient greek mythology.
sudo mod me up