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: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Friday January 05 2018, @03:24PM
I've seen those of course, but I fondly remember going straight for Radio Shack's direct connect modem. Also 300 baud, but with a three-position switch originate-off-answer. I stayed with that for a long time until I got one of DAK's smart duck 1200 bps smartmodems. The smart duck had an onboard real time clock (why?), and IBM PC XT clones didn't, so part of my DOS autoexec.bat was spent querying the modem for the time and setting the PC's clock on boot-up. I had forgotten about that little hack until I started thinking about the history of modems. Good times.