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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:51PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:51PM (#617943)

    I learned how to program from that same orange book I think.
    It's been years, but I'd seen it in the library and brought it home and tried to figure things out from there.
    mind you, it was the late 90s for me, and I actually didn't know of any BASIC interpreters... other than the VBA that came with MS Office (luckily, I'd figured out that I could replace Print/Input with MsgBox/InputBox), but the book was straight out of 1980.
    Would have gone a lot smoother if I knew qbasic existed, haha.
    so little kid me spent ages trying to port the tic-tac-toe program at the back of the book and because I'd needed to do so many changes, I never did get it to work
    and the bit that mentioned delay loops had me giggling because my computer needed much, much bigger numbers to get it to pause for any noticeable amount of time

    eventually, I'd picked up a C++ book that came with a compiler (looking back, it was a fairly poor book, but the compiler on the CD was a great boon) and that's when I'd really started actually programming a lot

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  • (Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:13PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:13PM (#617957)

    There once was a man, a worthless man. This man was a programmer. All of the programs this individual wrote were efficient and almost entirely free of bugs. The man was obsessed with speed and efficiency, to the point where these things became the most important things in his life.

    The man's desire for more speed possessed him, and he began engaging in activities that endangered himself and others. For example, he began running everywhere he went and knocking everyone out of his way. He even began driving hundreds of miles per hour down every road. Anyone could imagine that these actions would have dire consequences, and they eventually did. One day while driving, he smashed into a tree and lost his ability to walk.

    Why did this happen? Because the man's programs were too efficient. Speed is dangerous, and efficiency is toxic. The man's life was empty from the beginning, and he only realized it after he lost everything. The man began to hate everything in existence... until he found it. Yes, he finally found it. The one thing that could at last bring him out of his spiral of destruction.

    Gamemaker. He knew. As soon as he saw it, he knew. He knew that everyone should use Gamemaker for all their programming needs. Indeed, he knew. By using Gamemaker, all of his programs became buggy and slow, and what once took him one day to write now took over a year. Finally, his life had meaning and he could call himself a True Programmer. All thanks to Gamemaker.

    Return.
    Return.
    Gamemaker can do anything.
    Return.
    Return.
    There's nothing that Gamemaker cannot do.
    You can return.
    You may return.
    You must return.
    You shall return!
    Return... to Gamemakerdom!
    Return, you insolent insect! Return now, or you are nothing but a stain on existence itself!
    Return, you empty husk of a human being!
    Return, return, return, return, return to Gamemakerdooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @04:36AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @04:36AM (#618201)

      Man, I remember using GM5 back when it was advertised on TechTV. Probably my first non-trivial programming project was a game made entirely in GML.
      holy hell GM was slow
      It's improved massively with 6 onward, but a GM5 game will only run at full-speed on a machine faster than the one used to develop it.

      gml is still an awful hackjob of a language, but it gets the job done
      implicit object variables are absolutely awful though and have caused me more pain than anything else