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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, @10:16PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:16PM (#618009)

    I taught myself to program in BASIC on my high school's OSI Challenger 2P, which had a 6502 processor, 4K bytes of RAM, Microsoft BASIC in an 8K ROM, and cassette tape storage. I programmed lots of games with the graphical character "font", which had airplanes going in various directions, halves of ships, lines and angles, etc. I also discovered that the random number generator wasn't very random, which led me to the world of procedurally generated content. I then taught myself 6502 machine language, but not assembly language because I had no assembler, just hexadecimal numbers typed into a monitor. When the school bought an Apple II+, I played with file storage on the disk drive, and figured out fun tricks that the other kids couldn't understand. My favorite game on the Apple II was "The Prisoner".

    I took a class on data structures at a local college and programmed in Pascal on some minicomputer, which I do not remember the model of. Lots of late night work on glass TTYs, which I loved because they had a fast connection to the CPU (9600 bps!) and not the slow 300 bps of the printing TTYs.

    After that I got a summer job writing code in BASIC on the brand new IBM PC. Then I went to college where I had an account on a Multics system and used some PDP-11s.

    Subsequent to that, things got serious.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 05 2018, @04:38AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday January 05 2018, @04:38AM (#618203)

    Ozzy!!!! We had a donated OSI at our high school, I think from a law firm in about 1983, it came with 8" floppy drives.

    It was used by "independent study comp-sci," about 6 of us who knew far more than the comp-sci teacher - we'd mess around with it, make it do whatever it could, which wasn't a whole lot.

    --
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