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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: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday January 05 2018, @02:24AM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Friday January 05 2018, @02:24AM (#618168) Journal
    I had some simple programming courses in school using an Apple II in the beginning, but things really took off for me when I got my own computer, which was, like for many others here, a C-64. I very quickly took to BASIC and then managed to find machine language programming references from a computer shop which I had photocopied and I began writing simple stuff. Reference works on seriously programming the C-64 were extremely hard to come by though even if you had the money to buy them, which I didn't. The really serious programming began around the late eighties after my father got me an IBM PC XT compatible. References for this were a lot easier to get, and it was much easier to convince my parents to buy them. I learned how to program x86 assembly from Peter Norton's books on the topic, and in those days my most well-thumbed references included the Pink Shirt Book, and later learned C, using Turbo C. I did all sorts of weird stuff using DOS DEBUG.EXE including stripping off copy protection from some games, removing viruses, and so on. I'd written some simple graphics programs as well, including an evolution simulator based on ideas from an article in SciAm I ran across, and some simple 3D graphics based on algorithms I picked up off of random BYTE and Dr. Dobb's Journal articles (all of these were godawful expensive with a high school kid's allowance). I can remember struggling with hardware that was always a few generations behind because my dad was too cheap to get me any really good gear. By the time I got into college in the mid-nineties my mother had given me enough money to buy a top of the line Pentium PC and at around the same time a friend of mine also lent me a Slackware 3.1 CD set he had somehow gotten, and I installed it there. And except for games, I never seriously used anything by Microsoft ever again.
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