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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: 4, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday January 05 2018, @01:17PM
In the '80s, the Thatcher government did a surprisingly good thing (very surprising, when measured against all of the other things that they did). They set up a programme to encourage schools to teach useful computer skills. This was done well, unlike later approaches of simply dumping money on schools to buy computers, and involved a lot of different components:
They defined a set of functionality that the computer must have (including a programming language with built-in support for structured programming) and asked companies to tender designs. Schools that bought any computers that met these criteria could claim half of the money back from central government. The winner of the competition was used in the educational material and allowed to carry the BBC branding. This machine was designed by Acorn and ran a dialect of BASIC designed mostly by Sophie (then Roger) Wilson. It had subroutines, typed variables, direct access to memory-mapped I/O devices via peek and poke, and even an integrated assembler.
They had the BBC produce a set of TV programmes explaining how to program the machines. These were shown early in the morning so that schools could record them and play them back for students, on the understanding that most schools didn't have any teachers that were competent to teach programming (most still don't).
Finally, they reserved a range of the BBC's teletext service to distribute the example materials overnight. You could get a tuner for the BBC and download example programs and so on and save them to disk or tape.
The whole setup was extremely well done. My school had a half-hour lesson each week called 'general' where headmaster taught whatever he thought was interesting. The first term, when I started there aged 7, was programming on the BBC. The school had three of them, but all in different rooms. We'd all go into the library where there was a big TV connected to the BBC so the whole class could see the screen, and he'd show us some simple programs and have us say what the next line should be. That was enough to get me interested in using the machines at break times, lunchtimes, and after school and eventually getting a computer at home that could be used for programming.
The following term, he taught ancient greek mythology.
sudo mod me up