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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: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday January 05 2018, @08:32PM
A Bendix G-15 D. Its main memory was a magnetic drum.
My father, a university professor, took the programming course; I read the manuals and explained it to him. And I got to go with him to use the computer. I would be using it while he wondered what had gone wrong with his last debug run.
I used the high-level language for that machine. It closely resembled todays machine languages. It has numerical opcodes, an index register, and accumulators, and hexadecimal input and output. My first program was one that printed out a multiplication table modulo 7. Which I took home and colored in different patterns.
The real machine language was something else entirely. Each instruction was a transfer of data from a source to a destination to be done at a particular time during drum revolution. Sources were the read heads for the magnetic drum, destinations were the write heads, and various oddities like the addend input to the accumulator, which would read the other addend from a the accumulator's read head while writing the sum to the accumulator's write head.
Oh, and each instruction would contain a field specifying when the instruction was to be executed, and when it was to read the next instruction.
I learned this one summer reading the circuit diagrams for the machine, I never got a real machine languge progrm to work on that machie.