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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:30PM
Discounting a programmable calculator (HP-48) I got started with a FORTRAN course and then another one about "numerical methods" while studying physics. Spend a lot of time (sometimes whole nights in the department), playing around with all kinds of things. Found several security issued (which was rather simple more than 30 years ago;-), told the admin about it and how to fix it and got given the root password for the departments computer (a VAX780 IIRC) to fix it myself....
A bit later got a Z80 based home computer running CP/M, learned BASIC, Pascal and Assembler and (manually, of course) disassembled most of the OS since I wanted to know e.g. what happends when I press a key and how this results in a letter appearing on the screen, or how things get written to the floppy disk etc. At that time I could read Z80 machine code from a hex dump...
Then got an Atari, learned C and got aquainted with UNIX. The moment there was a port of Linux for the Atari TT's M68030 processor (around 1994, no distros for that yet, it was copy all kinds of stuff and try to get it somehow to compile and run) I mostly switched over to that. Fun times;-)
Of course, trying to get my hands on books (no WWW back then but, luckily, good book shops) was also a big part. I still very fondly remember Tannenbaum's "Structured Computer Organisation" - bought it a day before Christmas and only "reemerged" about four days later when I had reached the end - what an incredible amount of ideas competely new to me back then!