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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: 5, Interesting) by coolgopher on Friday January 05 2018, @12:52AM
Finally someone who mentions the ZX Spectrum! I think I was about 6 when I inherited one from my significantly older cousin. It came with a spiral-bound book full of BASIC programs, which I spent hours typing in. The only one I had success with was a graphing one which produced something that looked like a sombrero. I *almost* got the "asteroids" game working fully, except I couldn't work out how to type in the heart-in-a-square-with-inverted-colours character, which I believe is what would've made the erasing of the old spaceship sprite work rather than leave a trail of spaceships across the screen. Not reading English at that age (not my native language), I didn't get very far and kind of lost interest for a while.
A few years later I eventually joined the wave of C64 owners (took me a long time to save up!), and got to tinker with it's version of BASIC. With the C64 being second hand, the available documentation was close to nil however, and almost everyone else who had one used it for gaming only. There were a couple of us who tried to get into programming, but there was also no documentation to be had via the local bookstore nor the library. Again, I didn't get very far with programming on the C64. Gaming on the other hand...
Add another year or so, and we got to the first actual programming course. This was on some Ericsson hardware with dual 5 1/4" drives. Again, BASIC. Armed with the experience from the C64, we ran circles around the teacher... and while fun, it wasn't all that useful.
The real breakthrough came in year 8, after I'd gotten myself a part time job at the local supermarket (pretty sure I was too young for it legally speaking, but it benefited both parties so we never brought it up). This allowed me to save up the comparatively yuuge sums required to by a Real PC. Thus, I acquired an IBM PS/1 with a 486sx-25MHz. Then in a stroke of luck, one of my colleagues at the supermarket introduced me to one of his friends who was seriously into computers. Through him I learned the ins and outs of assembling hardware and doing upgrades, and a never-ending stream of software from one of his mates who ran a BBS. I still have the jar of miscellaneous screws, nuts, standoffs and other bits and bobs he gifted me by splitting his such stash.
Anyway, one of the times I was over visiting he was tinkering with something new. He was building a maze generator in something I'd never seen before. This something turned out to be Turbo Pascal, which I promptly got a less-than-legitimate copy of and started experimenting with. I finally had the tools to build "real executables"! Between the in-built help reference and various text files sourced from the local BBS, I was able to start building useful things for the first time. I wrote a handful of save game editors (which incidentally is how I learned that the AI in Civilization cheats), an address book with approximate search capability, and various other small things. It was a lot of fun, but I still felt limited by the tools at my disposal. Sprinkling the code with inline assembler 'db 66h' gets tedious after a while...
The second breakthrough came in '95 when I got to go on exchange to Australia, and in a bookstore in Canberra found several books on programming in C and C++. After negotiating a serious discount with the sales manager I left lugging a backpack full of books and a very light wallet. Once having picked up rudimentary C (using Turbo C that came with one of the books), I splashed out on a genuine copy of Watcom's C/C++ compiler suite. This gave me access to Windows programming as well, and the event driven approach was somewhat of a revelation at the time. I used Watcom for quite some time until I found gcc after having installed FreeBSD (since I couldn't get NetBSD to install on my hardware at the time).