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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: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:03PM (1 child)
I learned BASIC on the TRS-80 Color Computer (Coco) in 1982.
Mastered that dialect approximately completely at age 12, to the point that I was writing assembly routines for the Motorola 6809 to speed up the slow bits. Ran out of memory (Machine could officially hold 32K which was really 64K, about 48K of which was usable and the rest was shadow RAM of the ROMs.) and so installed a 128K upgrade that held arrays in switched banks of upper memory.
Fast forward 36 years, and I can still write Basic with mastery. I use FreeBasic under Gnu/Linux for reasonably advanced scripting and small applications. But being that I learned Basic really well, that put me behind on everything else. Mastery of Basic is kind of a handicap. Though it has over the years led to some well-paid professional work in VB4, 5, and 6.
I took a university class in Pascal in the late 80s that taught me things like "Ugh, Pascal sucks" and how to use begin...end (better known as {...} ). Biggest advantage of that class was that it made it really easy to learn PHP.
I can PHP pretty good (learned when it was PHP3 and kept up), and I can write decent bash scripts using flow control, variables, conditional testing, etc. I know enough SQL (via Mysql) to create, insert, update, select, delete, write sql functions, and do basic joins (where the power is).
I have done several self-study courses on C, but I'd struggle to compile a hello world in that language. I also don't understand these kids and their python (my ARM single-board computers have Debian + FreeBasic on them).
It could be worse, I guess. My son, for example, has as his first mastered programming language the "Basic" on the TI 83 series of calculators.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday January 05 2018, @01:30PM
Ah now BASIC09 on OS9 on a coco (later a coco3) was where I was at. That was a heck of a nice BASIC. I'm not sure if there is any modern BASIC as good as BASIC09
I remember entering a programming competition, it was unbelievably lame like write CRUD DBMS with a storage format of one line of a text file is a record and there were no columns, and we competed on a local college brand new VAX which had a BASIC somehow even worse than generic home computer MSBASIC, and I spent most of the time thinking this sux compared to BASIC09 at home.
My primary memory of Coco era was Radio Shack sold inferior disk drives, slow stepping speed and only 35 tracks worked and single sided, whereas everyone "in the real world" was using DSDD 40 track so it was a constant game to patch your device descriptors to enable staggeringly higher performance outta your 3rd party drives.
Now OS9 had/has a decent C compiler and this was in the days you'd pay $100 or $300 or whatever it was for a compiler. Kids these days not knowing how easy they got it, etc. There was a tiny little catch. K+R first edition.
I don't remember the details but generally speaking I could hack around in K+R 1st edition in a couple months but it took about half a year to get used to later version C almost a decade later on linux due to having to unlearn and habits. I don't remember it being a huge difference either.
I vaguely remember compiling on OS9 required writing scripts to run the multiple passes for your project. "make" was merely a daydream for the future at that time, at least on a tiny low performance system (maybe on a PDP11 or VAX I could have run make).