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"!
Related Stories
UPDATE 2: (martyb)
This still-developing story is full of twists and turns. It seems that Intel chips are definitely implicated (AFAICT anything post Pentium Pro). There have been various reports, and denials, that AMD and ARM are also affected. There are actually two vulnerabilities being addressed. Reports are that a local user can access arbitrary kernel memory and that, separately, a process in a VM can access contents of other virtual machines on a host system. These discoveries were embargoed for release until January 9th, but were pre-empted when The Register first leaked news of the issues.
At this time, manufacturers are scrambling to make statements on their products' susceptibility. Expect a slew of releases of urgent security fixes for a variety of OSs, as well as mandatory reboots of VMs on cloud services such as Azure and AWS. Implications are that there is going to be a performance hit on most systems, which may have cascading follow-on effects for performance-dependent activities like DB servers.
To get started, see the very readable and clearly-written article at Ars Technica: What’s behind the Intel design flaw forcing numerous patches?.
Google Security Blog: Today's CPU vulnerability: what you need to know.
Google Project Zero: Reading privileged memory with a side-channel, which goes into detail as to what problems are being addressed as well as including CVEs:
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jdavidb on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:33PM (6 children)
My earliest exposure to programming was in books. My 3rd grade classroom (1980s) had an orange paperback book with BASIC programs in it that I kept picking up for silent reading time. The programs at the beginning of the book just printed pictures made out of asterisks, and I hardly noticed the "PRINT" statements and quotation marks; I was just looking at the pictures and thinking they were interesting designs. Then further on it started introducing variables and control statements and I started to realize that I was looking at something that was a lot more dynamic than just pictures. Around the same time National Geographic World magazine printed a very simple, ~20 line "guess a number" BASIC game that sparked my interest.
Later I moved on to a green hardback book from the school library that walked step by step through building 3 games in BASIC: Tic Tac Toe, Go Fish, and Checkers, IIRC. I learned the basic principle of representing real world objects like cards or game pieces as numbers and data structures and the spark was fanned into a flame. I was so eager to program that even though I didn't have a computer I filled a 3 prong folder full of looseleaf notebook paper that I covered with handwritten code in pencil. I spent days adapting the Checkers game to try to create a Chess game. If I remember right I "finished" but of course I couldn't debug it, and a year or two later when I actually had a computer (Apple IIGs) to key it into it didn't work.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:51PM (2 children)
I learned how to program from that same orange book I think.
It's been years, but I'd seen it in the library and brought it home and tried to figure things out from there.
mind you, it was the late 90s for me, and I actually didn't know of any BASIC interpreters... other than the VBA that came with MS Office (luckily, I'd figured out that I could replace Print/Input with MsgBox/InputBox), but the book was straight out of 1980.
Would have gone a lot smoother if I knew qbasic existed, haha.
so little kid me spent ages trying to port the tic-tac-toe program at the back of the book and because I'd needed to do so many changes, I never did get it to work
and the bit that mentioned delay loops had me giggling because my computer needed much, much bigger numbers to get it to pause for any noticeable amount of time
eventually, I'd picked up a C++ book that came with a compiler (looking back, it was a fairly poor book, but the compiler on the CD was a great boon) and that's when I'd really started actually programming a lot
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:13PM (1 child)
There once was a man, a worthless man. This man was a programmer. All of the programs this individual wrote were efficient and almost entirely free of bugs. The man was obsessed with speed and efficiency, to the point where these things became the most important things in his life.
The man's desire for more speed possessed him, and he began engaging in activities that endangered himself and others. For example, he began running everywhere he went and knocking everyone out of his way. He even began driving hundreds of miles per hour down every road. Anyone could imagine that these actions would have dire consequences, and they eventually did. One day while driving, he smashed into a tree and lost his ability to walk.
Why did this happen? Because the man's programs were too efficient. Speed is dangerous, and efficiency is toxic. The man's life was empty from the beginning, and he only realized it after he lost everything. The man began to hate everything in existence... until he found it. Yes, he finally found it. The one thing that could at last bring him out of his spiral of destruction.
Gamemaker. He knew. As soon as he saw it, he knew. He knew that everyone should use Gamemaker for all their programming needs. Indeed, he knew. By using Gamemaker, all of his programs became buggy and slow, and what once took him one day to write now took over a year. Finally, his life had meaning and he could call himself a True Programmer. All thanks to Gamemaker.
Return.
Return.
Gamemaker can do anything.
Return.
Return.
There's nothing that Gamemaker cannot do.
You can return.
You may return.
You must return.
You shall return!
Return... to Gamemakerdom!
Return, you insolent insect! Return now, or you are nothing but a stain on existence itself!
Return, you empty husk of a human being!
Return, return, return, return, return to Gamemakerdooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @04:36AM
Man, I remember using GM5 back when it was advertised on TechTV. Probably my first non-trivial programming project was a game made entirely in GML.
holy hell GM was slow
It's improved massively with 6 onward, but a GM5 game will only run at full-speed on a machine faster than the one used to develop it.
gml is still an awful hackjob of a language, but it gets the job done
implicit object variables are absolutely awful though and have caused me more pain than anything else
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:09PM (2 children)
I started by quizzing a 10th grade classmate, probably one of 5 kids in a school of 1000 who knew more than absolutely nothing. I'd ask him what he knew about BASIC, syntax to make it do arithmetic operations, etc. Then, I'd loiter in Radio Shacks around town and try out what he told me, extend, experiment, etc. I bought a couple of magazines like BYTE and learned more.
That lasted about 2 months before I finally broke the piggy bank and spent my entire life savings on an Atari 800 with 16K of RAM, a BASIC cartridge, Star Raiders, and a joystick. I had to save up to get the cassette player later, and it took years to save enough for an 88K floppy drive.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday January 05 2018, @07:16PM (1 child)
Star raiders was a neat game.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 05 2018, @07:39PM
Awesome for its day.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:36PM
I remember my first foray in computer programming was as a very young school kid when my parents got a (IBM?) computer with a Orange Monochrome screen. It had a 5 1/4" floppy drive, a 3.5" floppy drive with No Hard Drive. Everything just booted off whatever disk you had in the drive. They got some computer game program book, I typed the program in and played the game. That's what eventually led me into a Computer degree at the University I attended. I ended up working at a Library, but have recently picked up programming again. Played some with Visual Studio and C#, but have switched to Python for the latest projects.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:44PM (6 children)
I'm no coder - these days code-wise I just bash out occasional Autohotkey kludges - but anyway.... First computer and first machine I programmed on: A C64. Started with BASIC, ran into a performance wall, stumbled across a copy of Jim Butterfield's SuperMon somewhere, started doing assembly through that. Used that for years before running into a proper assembler. (Such an innovation not having to re-do all your jumps and branches every time you edited your code - or, more typically, not having to leave a ton of null padding for changes.)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dbe on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:56PM
Ha, but this is still done today: disabling "Incremental linking" in Visual studio will reduce your executable file size by half...
After looking at the binary content I saw that basically they had a whole bunch of 0 padding in there to avoid redoing most of the linking.
I guess it's better done by a tool than by hand though :)
-dbe
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tfried on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:56PM
The Archon, he? I see you were not in it for the programming, too much... Well, neither was I, but yes, the one thing that makes the C64 a distinct memory is how its ROM said "Hi there! How would you like to program me right now?" in a way that I did not ever see again in my personal history of computing.
The C64 was my first "real" computer, and my primary computer for at least four years straight. Unfortunately, thinking back to the (lack of) sophistication of the programming I did on it just makes me shudder today. Well, I guess we all started basic, even if it wasn't BASIC on the C64. But to me, programming will always start with "38911 Basic Bytes Free".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:58PM
Yeah C64 for me too. Well, I read some books first actually and got curious about it. I studied a little code that way, spent a week of "computer camp" one summer -- I can't remember what system. But then the first real experience was years messing around on a Commodore.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Friday January 05 2018, @01:01AM (1 child)
This is more or less my experience to, even tho I had started a bit earlier with the Sinclair 48k but it was mostly just typing things in from magazines and books and then wondering why it didn't work most of the time. Considering that it was mostly just complete pages filled with numbers I'm fairly sure that it was user error and I just typed something wrong somewhere. That I barely knew any English probably didn't help either. Sometimes they worked and that was marvelous. Then I slowly started to change things in then to just see what would happen. It was learning by doing until I found some books I could actually read and eventually I found the same book, I knew how to read by then.
The C64 eventually became an Amiga, and another one and another one and another one (the last one is boxed up and stored away). Same route there, Basic (written by Microsoft as I recall it, and it was horribly slow and things took forever to compile) so you just had to learn ASM as there was no substitute. I mostly used Amiga at home until probably the early 2000's. I didn't pick up C until probably the mid to late 90's when I was given access to the local university labs (this was also how I first got onto the Internet). So some C on the Sun Solaris Sparc stations (I grabbed a few of them when the uni was throwing them out years later -- they are still around here somewhere ... in boxes ... somewhere), and Perl. I worked some years just doing web stuff in the early 2000's and then I wrote some backend stuff and then I had just had enough.
I didn't like how things developed anymore, to many people involved, to many non-programmers telling me what to do, to many shitty new languages (*cough* JAVA *cough*), moving to Windows programming was just horrible coming from UNIX and Amiga. So I just stopped, went back to the University and started to do maths, statistics and social science and I'm still doing that. From time to time I still write or cobble together a little C program to solve some problem. But it's quite rare these days.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday January 05 2018, @07:42PM
If you were programming for fun, you still can, Get a Linux box. It's a lot like Unix. You can ignore the distracting modern fluff if you want, the core programmable system is still there. And X with a minimal window manager will do the kinds of things the Amiga used to do, and it'll even do it over a network if you want.
I graduated from an Amiga to Linux, now using Devuan linux on an almost ten-year-old machine. Great fun!
(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
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Linatux on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:58PM (2 children)
In High School I was sending FORTRAN coding sheets to a local institute where they were punched onto cards, then executed on an ICL machine.
When the card deck was returned to me I could make minor corrections by carefully poking out holes in pre-cut cards - or send code sheets with corrections.
Since then I've worked in all sorts of different areas - networking, ops, sysprog, sysadmin... Don't code much any more.
Actually - it's more like meetings, spreadsheets and more meetings. The thrill has gone.
Mowing lawns or washing windows has never looked more attractive!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 05 2018, @04:20AM (1 child)
When I took a computer class at the local junior college, in about 1983, they had just phased out using the punch cards for classes - though they still had a couple of card puncher stations and would run the occasional batch.
We used the crudest of CRT/keyboard consoles to enter our Fortran77 and submit it for test runs.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Friday January 05 2018, @04:58AM
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:58PM (1 child)
We got a TRS-80 somewhere around 1980 but I wasn't interested until my dad brought home a computer magazine with the BASIC source of several games printed on its pages. After it eventually broke though, I didn't touch another computer until we got a 486. Even then I didn't program again until Linux existed. Boobs were just more interesting. They still are, mind you, but now I know there are a gerzillion of them out there and they'll still be there after I write a few more lines of code.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:36PM
Ah yes, I spent many hours typing code into my Color Computer 1 from magazines. It was an exercise in debugging, most of the time. Either I'd made typos or the code itself had errors. You'd find out in the next issue or so of the magazine, if you couldn't figure it out, lol. But real programming was learned on the same machine as I used it with a 300 baud modem to connect to the Univ. of MD's mainframe to write code for my Fortran class. Beat the hell out of standing in line behind others who were lucky enough to have a seat at a terminal on campus. Or working on a DECWriter II... Writing code in your pj's is how it should be done!
(Score: 5, Funny) by Justin Case on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:03PM (2 children)
I found one at a friend's house. Having read plenty of science fiction, I sat down and typed:
PLEASE PROVIDE OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS.
It said:
SYNTAX ERROR
So then I cried because the machine had rejected me, harmed my self esteem, and ruined my chance for a good career.
No, wait, that wasn't it. I looked down, saw I had a penis, and decided I didn't care what the computer thought of me. I went to a computer store and tried out various machines and books until it started making sense. Then I bought one, and spent the next X years writing my own printer and modem drivers, because it came with damn near nothing.
Decades later, it still helps to know how things really work under all those layers of abstraction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:36PM
Lame attempt at humor is lame, here's a dull axe think you can get that polished up for me by tomorrow?
(Score: 5, Funny) by krishnoid on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:45PM
This sounds suspicious. Whose penis?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:04PM
Started on CP/M on a Kaypro around 1983-84 programming in basic and fortran. Then worked my way "up" to a vic 20, then a C=64 learning assembly, and then I saved enough to get an Amiga. I miss those days. Computers have been down-hill ever since. Now I support ancient code on VMS.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by J053 on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:13PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:17PM (7 children)
For programming.... In the early 80s my Junior High school had a computer lab (one of the first in the state to have one - it was a model to other school districts). There were twenty to twenty five Commodore/CBM PET computers and four TRS-80 Model III systems. I liked the TRS-80s. They had mimeographed sheets on the walls showing PRINT, GOTO, and INPUT commands for BASIC. I wrote my first programs on lunch hour. My first major achievement asked to solve something like five multiplication problems in a row, where I used random integers assigned to variables, and a FOR/NEXT loop to do five in a row.
My birthday present that year was a 16K Model III with Cassette drive, and the next year the school asked me to coordinate the school's locker system and assignments using the Profile database program. Shortly thereafter I was allowed to take a "free study" class where I could do whatever I felt led to do, as nobody in the school could teach me much more. My folks later bought me the RS-232 card and a 150 baud modem for my Model III. So I taught myself a tiny bit of Z80 assembly and using EDTASM wrote a terminal emulator program using an example in one of the programming manuals. I wrote the program then saved it to casette, then loaded and ran it. Multiple times while I taught myself how to debug.... I finally figured out that the book was defaulting 8-N-1 parity and I needed to have it be 7-E-1 (or 2... can't remember...) to match into what the local BBSes were using. Then I had to fix the duplex mode. When I finally got it to load and made contact with a local BBS and was able to carry out a full session with it - that was one of the proudest days of my life. I really felt like a programmer - even though I was learning how a program someone else wrote worked.
My last year in Junior High I was the first recipient of the school's "Outstanding Computer Technician" award. :)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @11:04PM
My junior high programming project for the science fair was mentioned in a local newspaper. Specifically, I was named as starting a fight with my classmates over whose program was best.
Had the science fair occurred today, it would be called a "STEM fair" and I would be in jail for domestic terrorism, because America.
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 04 2018, @11:13PM (5 children)
Heh, my dad got right pissed when I recorded a program over his CCR tape.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @11:57PM (2 children)
My dad got his revenge by breaking the tone knob off the tape recorder so my programs would never load from tape again. He tried destroying my floppy disks by crumpling them, but the disk drive could still read the floppies. So my dad cut up my disks with scissors.
Yes I had an abusive childhood.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Friday January 05 2018, @12:49AM (1 child)
Seen those YouTube dads smashing their kids electronics?
The lesson taught is priceless. When you dont get your way, smash things
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @02:45AM
No. I don't watch that kind of shit on YouTube because I see enough fucking assholes in real life.
(Score: 2, Funny) by anubi on Friday January 05 2018, @12:44AM (1 child)
How long did it take before he discovered it?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 05 2018, @01:58AM
Oh, a day or so. I was quite young and still foolish enough to leave it out by the computer.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:19PM
I was a video game addict, I bought a TRS-80 thinking I could save money in the arcades. That didn't work so well. Found out I liked programming BASIC more than playing games, coded up Conway's game of life. It didn't run, I couldn't figure out why. Went and got some dinner, when I came back I had a new generation. So I learned Z-80 assembly.
At work our product was a diagnostic machine with a keypad and something like a 5" screen. It ran on the 8080. A co-worker and I wrote a Space Invaders game for it. We wrote the code at home, hand converted it to hex, and at work punched the hex into the machine via keypad and saved it to tape. One day a guy from Marketing saw us working on it and said "gimme a copy of that!" Turned out our 90% done program spent the next few years making the trade show rounds.
About a week later the engineering VP came in and said "who wrote that?". Steve and I looked at each other thinking "oh shit, busted". We raised our hands and Mike, the VP said "You wanna be engineers?". I said yes, Steve didn't want the responsibility, and the following monday I went from being an electronics tech to writing 8086 assembly software for our new product. Things steamrolled from there.
Things turned out ok though, with the bump in salary I didn't have a problem paying for my video game addiction.
This whole story happened 80ish to 82ish.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:22PM
I think my first exposure to programming was TI-BASIC on the TI-83+ in high school. Sat down one Saturday with the user manual and figured out how to bang out a menu-driven program to calculate surface area etc. of various solids for geometry...which I'd already finished the class in, but hey.
Did a fair amount of BASIC like that then went and got a CS degree after failing about a hundred advanced math courses. Graduated back in 2012 and have been developing at a string of obsolete industries since then ;-)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:38PM
My mother was sick and stayed home. She had a deadline though so I wrote it for her. It was with a pen on a special paper form. No errors - just operator's mistypes when transfered to punch cards.
Yes, it was way simpler those days.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:42PM (6 children)
My first programming experience was a ZX81 (but already with the big 16 KB memory expansion pack attached). It certainly was helpful that the only thing you could do with it out of the box was to program it.
I started with the built-in BASIC (using the manual that came with it) and then started to learn machine code from a magazine. Yes, not just assembly, machine code. I converted all those instructions into Hex codes by hand.
Later I then got a ZX Spectrum 48K, which I used a lot (again, mostly BASIC, a bit of machine code, and later I also got a Pascal compiler for it, HiSoft Pascal).
It's incredible how much obsolete knowledge you collect over time. I probably will never again need the fact that the Z80 ret instruction had opcode C9, but I probably won't ever forget it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(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).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Friday January 05 2018, @01:47AM (4 children)
I'm pretty sure my first *experience* was with my cousins TRS-80. He had written a few useful programs, two in particular I remember; one did ballistics, the other was a dungeon masters assistant.
I had to get my own. Money was tight but somehow I managed to get my dad to spring for a Timex/Sinclair kit. Then he had to teach me how to use the soldering gun. Good times.
"I started with the built-in BASIC (using the manual that came with it) and then started to learn machine code from a magazine. Yes, not just assembly, machine code. I converted all those instructions into Hex codes by hand."
From a magazine? IIRC my kit came with a manual which listed all the z80 opcodes in an appendix. Just optimized the most important subroutines into peeks and pokes using that. This was from age 9 to 11 or 12. Then I lost interest in computers completely for a few years.
Good times.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday January 05 2018, @06:06AM (3 children)
You were sure lucky to have been able to acquire your knowledge of how computers actually work in a day and age where doing such things was legal.
I learned mine on an IMSAI 8080. Mostly hand-assembled machine code. Until I got the assembler working anyway. Which was another 4K bytes ( 2 * 2716 EPROMS ) of hand entered machine code. At that time, a large brown paperback book had been published with the code for the assembler, but I still had to rely on my own routines for input/output/file save devices.
All of my hardware was what I could get my hands on. A TV and a video card for 16 lines * 64 character memory-mapped video, and a salvaged dot matrix printer where I only got the print mechanism, drive motor, line feed solenoid, and the eight solenoids on the print head. It was up to me to design the hardware/software to interface to make something readable come out.
My file storage was a cassette deck where I wrote directly to the head ( Signetics 8T97 drivers, IIRC, and read with an LM382 circuit and I believe an 8T20 monostable to decode the manchester code I was using. Really simple file system. Just a block number followed by the load address then 2K bytes. Because that was the size of a 2716. ( At the lowest level, I had sync bytes for the manchester decoder to lock up on... but once locked, the payload was 2K bytes ).
I had everything on that old IMSAI was segmented into 2K blocks - so I could either read or write any segment of the memory to/from tape.
Fixed size so I could overwrite a block without having to reformat the whole tape.
The onus was on me to keep track of what block on tape was for what. If I said "R2A", my monitor would wait for hex block "2A" to pass under the read head, then it would put the data in the 2K block the header pointed to. Same with writing. The monitor would show me where I was on the tape, so as to cue me to manually rewind or fast forward the tape to get it closer to the beginning of the desired data.
Uhhh, one can do damned nearly anything in machine code!
Boy, its been a trip down memory lane just typing this post in...
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday January 05 2018, @07:18AM (1 child)
I truly weep for those who have grown up in a world where it makes no sense that the library hasn't been raided yet.
"I learned mine on an IMSAI 8080."
Nice.
"Which was another 4K bytes ( 2 * 2716 EPROMS ) of hand entered machine code."
And by 'hand entered' you mean you toggled physical switches for the ones and zeros then pushed the button once they were all right, one instruction at a time, is that right?
"Uhhh, one can do damned nearly anything in machine code!"
s/do damned nearly anything/gain full access to the hardware one owns
Anyhow, if you really entered and debugged your own assembler using toggle switches Imma gonna get back off your lawn now.
You have a nice night sir.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Friday January 05 2018, @11:16AM
Yes. Flip a row of toggle switches up and down. Load address. Flip switches again. Load data. Flip switches again. Load data. ... ad nauseum .. until all loaded.
Go back. Step through again. Make sure you did not misload any. One crash going through usually scrambles everything with a runaway stack.
My first EPROM programmer was a Godsend! ( 1702. Required a +105V programming voltage. 256 bytes each. And thank God they gave me the 8080 programming code preloaded on one of the chips that came on the board. I think it was Godbout electronics, but I can't be sure. )
Once I had that EPROM in place, that made all subsequent construction a helluva lot easier.
First thing was videoram handlers, keyboard handlers, and my first magtape storage.
It took several years before I had 2716 in place and was actually doing assembler. Once I was that advanced, I was getting my magtape filesystem up and running, along with more advanced serial I/O, print head drivers, and dreams of using it for industrial control.
To be honest, by the time I was able to get assembler, I already had a monitor in place and was using a rudimentary keyboard and TV based videoram. The assembler came shortly after I had 2716 storage capability.
I guess the first peripheral I had going on the IMSAI was the videoram driver, keyboard, and tape transport, which at that time had no file structure at all... I was putting all my code at 4000H, and I would read or write the whole 1K block... kinda like a bootstrap program... the code that did that was sitting at a 1702 address 8000H. I had 1K Videorams at E800H and EC00H, with other I/O starting at E000H. The F000H thru FFFFH was the last 4K RAM/ROM slot. I had lots of RAM.. 32K of it. 0000H-8000H. Never did use it all.
What I did not stuff with RAM, I stuffed with 2716, and at the time had it filled with support routines... much like the BIOS calls of DOS ... for reading keyboards, writing to the videorams, reading or writing to tape, and invoking my beloved assembler which was 99% copied from a large brown paperback book ( I believe SAMS published it ). I just had to point their assembler to my keyboard and display routines, and show it where the source file was, and where I wanted it to put the object code, and where some temp space was for it to put the symbol tables.
Those were the days!
It would be many years later before my next big head scratcher... Jeremy Bentham's book on "TCP/IP Lean" and the "TCP/IP illustrated" books came out, and I began horsing around with making my own "micro packets" and little custom protocols. Something I wanted to do, but never got around to it, was to put my IMSAI on the internet....just for the hell of it ... even if all I could do is ping and telnet into it. I would have to cheat and use some later technology to interface it though... like an X-Port or something similar. Well, by the time I do that, I've cheated.... then what's the point. If I am going to cheat, I may as well do an Arduino.
Back then, when the internet was just getting going, we had the +HCU, with +ORC and +Fravia ( I'm giving you the exact spelling, so if you want a little retro fun, Google still finds these guys if you aren't already aware of them. ).
I learned more stuff from those guys.... look for mirrors of "searchlores". There is still a helluva lot of stuff there. But at one time there was a lot more. I was really getting into their steganography stuff.
Now, the whole scene seems to be about what I can buy - but not understand.
I am the guy who loves to take a bunch of scrap and build a car... not shop all day at showrooms for stuff I can't afford.
I do not think there is any way to recreate the environment required for the education those of our generation got. Too encumbered with intellectual property rights and congressionally legislated ignorance. They do not want us knowing how the machines they use to control us work. Just like the priests of old took great offense to the public getting access to the holy books, and making their own judgements of whether the priest was full of shit or not. The priests lost their power when the people knew the truth. Now the priests are re-emerging with different robes... the robes of their self-proclaimed rightsholder status, codified into law by their congressional cohorts.
Where will it end? My guess is that another country will technically advance over us, build all of our stuff, then one day decide they will take our country as payment. We will fight back but our stuff, backdoored by them, ceases to function. They come in and all those property deeds filed by the haves, become heating fuel.
And we all will do whatever they tell us to do.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday January 09 2018, @04:06PM
Did you ever demon dial Sunnyvale, California and have a system ask if you wanted to play a game?
But seriously, thanks for sharing. I've never gotten to see and IMSAI up close, let alone use one, but how many of use had that fantasy?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:03PM (1 child)
I learned BASIC on the TRS-80 Color Computer (Coco) in 1982.
Mastered that dialect approximately completely at age 12, to the point that I was writing assembly routines for the Motorola 6809 to speed up the slow bits. Ran out of memory (Machine could officially hold 32K which was really 64K, about 48K of which was usable and the rest was shadow RAM of the ROMs.) and so installed a 128K upgrade that held arrays in switched banks of upper memory.
Fast forward 36 years, and I can still write Basic with mastery. I use FreeBasic under Gnu/Linux for reasonably advanced scripting and small applications. But being that I learned Basic really well, that put me behind on everything else. Mastery of Basic is kind of a handicap. Though it has over the years led to some well-paid professional work in VB4, 5, and 6.
I took a university class in Pascal in the late 80s that taught me things like "Ugh, Pascal sucks" and how to use begin...end (better known as {...} ). Biggest advantage of that class was that it made it really easy to learn PHP.
I can PHP pretty good (learned when it was PHP3 and kept up), and I can write decent bash scripts using flow control, variables, conditional testing, etc. I know enough SQL (via Mysql) to create, insert, update, select, delete, write sql functions, and do basic joins (where the power is).
I have done several self-study courses on C, but I'd struggle to compile a hello world in that language. I also don't understand these kids and their python (my ARM single-board computers have Debian + FreeBasic on them).
It could be worse, I guess. My son, for example, has as his first mastered programming language the "Basic" on the TI 83 series of calculators.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday January 05 2018, @01:30PM
Ah now BASIC09 on OS9 on a coco (later a coco3) was where I was at. That was a heck of a nice BASIC. I'm not sure if there is any modern BASIC as good as BASIC09
I remember entering a programming competition, it was unbelievably lame like write CRUD DBMS with a storage format of one line of a text file is a record and there were no columns, and we competed on a local college brand new VAX which had a BASIC somehow even worse than generic home computer MSBASIC, and I spent most of the time thinking this sux compared to BASIC09 at home.
My primary memory of Coco era was Radio Shack sold inferior disk drives, slow stepping speed and only 35 tracks worked and single sided, whereas everyone "in the real world" was using DSDD 40 track so it was a constant game to patch your device descriptors to enable staggeringly higher performance outta your 3rd party drives.
Now OS9 had/has a decent C compiler and this was in the days you'd pay $100 or $300 or whatever it was for a compiler. Kids these days not knowing how easy they got it, etc. There was a tiny little catch. K+R first edition.
I don't remember the details but generally speaking I could hack around in K+R 1st edition in a couple months but it took about half a year to get used to later version C almost a decade later on linux due to having to unlearn and habits. I don't remember it being a huge difference either.
I vaguely remember compiling on OS9 required writing scripts to run the multiple passes for your project. "make" was merely a daydream for the future at that time, at least on a tiny low performance system (maybe on a PDP11 or VAX I could have run make).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:10PM (1 child)
1970's. I was into playing with 7400 series, breadboards, etc. Was planning to go into electronics.
A friend introduced me to a 1970's HP programmable calculator. RPN. I was hooked. Writing programs for it. Trying to fit more elaborate programs into it limited capability.
Then the high school got a Wang computer with Wang BASIC. I ran with that. Excelled at it. Never looked back. I forgot which end of a soldering iron to pick up and still cannot remember.
Then I got hold of a TRS-80. Apple II. I wondered how they could have such a crappy BASIC language compared to what I had used in high school. Went to small college and learned everything I could devour. Languages. The innards of the minicomputer. It's assembly language. System level programming on it.
Got out of school, started first job using Pascal on Apple II, Apple ///, IBM PC and . . . Corvus Concept. Before long, Lisa, then Mac. Then Mac for many years while learning more languages (Lisp, C, C++). Then Linux. And Java -- which is almost an OS in that most things you expect of an OS have a portable counterpart. And web development in Java, which leads to JavaScript, JQuery, etc etc. A lot of other fun things along the way. Dabbling in compilers. GOFAI techniques (Good Old Fashioned AI, before today's modern AI). GOFAI = search algorithms, minimax games, pattern matching, prolog, expert systems, etc.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:47PM
. . . and i'm not dating myself with this post. Because it's more fun to date other people.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:16PM (1 child)
I taught myself to program in BASIC on my high school's OSI Challenger 2P, which had a 6502 processor, 4K bytes of RAM, Microsoft BASIC in an 8K ROM, and cassette tape storage. I programmed lots of games with the graphical character "font", which had airplanes going in various directions, halves of ships, lines and angles, etc. I also discovered that the random number generator wasn't very random, which led me to the world of procedurally generated content. I then taught myself 6502 machine language, but not assembly language because I had no assembler, just hexadecimal numbers typed into a monitor. When the school bought an Apple II+, I played with file storage on the disk drive, and figured out fun tricks that the other kids couldn't understand. My favorite game on the Apple II was "The Prisoner".
I took a class on data structures at a local college and programmed in Pascal on some minicomputer, which I do not remember the model of. Lots of late night work on glass TTYs, which I loved because they had a fast connection to the CPU (9600 bps!) and not the slow 300 bps of the printing TTYs.
After that I got a summer job writing code in BASIC on the brand new IBM PC. Then I went to college where I had an account on a Multics system and used some PDP-11s.
Subsequent to that, things got serious.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 05 2018, @04:38AM
Ozzy!!!! We had a donated OSI at our high school, I think from a law firm in about 1983, it came with 8" floppy drives.
It was used by "independent study comp-sci," about 6 of us who knew far more than the comp-sci teacher - we'd mess around with it, make it do whatever it could, which wasn't a whole lot.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:27PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:29PM (3 children)
I didn't have a computer when I was a boy. All I had were library books to tell me how amazing computers are and how wonderful it would be as soon as I could touch one. I read every book I could find about the Apple IIe, ProDOS, Applesoft Basic, and 6502 assembly language. I learned to program by reading tutorials, and I wrote Basic programs by hand on paper. Mostly I wrote games: craps, blackjack, checkers. When the library finally got a computer, I typed in my handwritten programs and my programs worked.
And three decades later, I still haven't found work as a coder.
Which reminds me...
I didn't have a girlfriend when I was a boy. All I had were underwear catalogs to show me how amazing nude women are and how wonderful it would be as soon as I could touch one.
And three decades later, I'm still a virgin.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:49PM (1 child)
It's not to late to learn to program. But STAY AWAY from Perl!
Even modern mental health care has difficulty helping people to achieve complete recovery from having programmed in Perl.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @11:11PM
Too late, I already learned Perl. And PHP, Python, and Ruby. They all suck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @06:35AM
Hey, after seeing all the problems my married friends got into, rethink your situation.
I never got married either. Came close a couple of times - but issues surfaced that wiggled the cement before it set, and things came loose before the legal bonds were in place.
Loneliness can be hell, but I think being legally bound to someone you no longer have love for nor does she love you, is even worse.
Don't get me wrong. I would love to be in the kind of relationship that TV and movies portray as a happy home. But the real-world evidence I have seen tells me that is rarely the case. I get the strong idea there is no way I could ever live up to her expectations, when she has an endless stream of new suitors, and I am an old toy. I will get thrown out as fast as 5 year old car, even if I am working perfectly. Even my ability to financially support a family is rendered moot by governmental subsidy programs. In the modern frame of things, I feel I am quite useless. Nothing I can do that the government can't do better with their unlimited financial resources. So, for me, its porn.
I guess I take what I can get. I can't afford the lamborghini, but I can have an old van. Take what I can get and be happy with it.
At my age, I grow weary of being a power supply trying to drive a short circuit. Trying to kiss ass. Office politics. All of which require tremendous amounts of my energy yet return nothing useful.
I'll post anon, as I feel I need to state my feelings about this from the heart. And let you know you are not alone. Other people have also taken the path of avoidance rather than put up with all the bullshit that goes with this modern governmental intrusion into family matters.
( If you think the families are having a tough go of dealing with governmental intrusion, look at the teaching profession! Given the liabilities of trying to tutor kids, I would not touch that with a ten foot pole! )
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:30PM
Discounting a programmable calculator (HP-48) I got started with a FORTRAN course and then another one about "numerical methods" while studying physics. Spend a lot of time (sometimes whole nights in the department), playing around with all kinds of things. Found several security issued (which was rather simple more than 30 years ago;-), told the admin about it and how to fix it and got given the root password for the departments computer (a VAX780 IIRC) to fix it myself....
A bit later got a Z80 based home computer running CP/M, learned BASIC, Pascal and Assembler and (manually, of course) disassembled most of the OS since I wanted to know e.g. what happends when I press a key and how this results in a letter appearing on the screen, or how things get written to the floppy disk etc. At that time I could read Z80 machine code from a hex dump...
Then got an Atari, learned C and got aquainted with UNIX. The moment there was a port of Linux for the Atari TT's M68030 processor (around 1994, no distros for that yet, it was copy all kinds of stuff and try to get it somehow to compile and run) I mostly switched over to that. Fun times;-)
Of course, trying to get my hands on books (no WWW back then but, luckily, good book shops) was also a big part. I still very fondly remember Tannenbaum's "Structured Computer Organisation" - bought it a day before Christmas and only "reemerged" about four days later when I had reached the end - what an incredible amount of ideas competely new to me back then!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by progo on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:39PM
I remember my main motivation for learning to read was so that I could learn more about my family's Commodore 64 and how to program it. I'm a professional programmer / IT guy now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fadrian on Thursday January 04 2018, @11:37PM
It was without a computer... Seriously. I come from a small town in the Midwest. Small enough that in the early 1970's, my high school had only one book on computers, but it had a snippet of FORTRAN 2 code in it. I studied that code. My next exposure to programming was the only book on that subject that the library at the county seat had - a SNOBOL manual, which I read from cover to cover. Finally, a friend of mine came back from college with a FORTRAN 4 text. I read the book and ran through the problems in my head and on paper until I felt I'd understand how to do this if I ever got a chance. So I was programming in my head about two years before I got my hands on a card punch when I went to college. From then on, most of the programming thing has been a simple matter of debugging... at least now I have access to real machines to experiment on.
As for where it's taken me? I've learned about many subject domains, worked with some of the largest companies in the world developing products that ordinary people have heard of, and had a lot of fun doing it. Plus, other than unboxing a stray machine or two, I've never had to break a sweat doing it. You really can't beat that.
That is all.
(Score: 2) by leftover on Thursday January 04 2018, @11:41PM
Then PDP-11/various, then VAX. Started with TRS-80 about then, followed by the common progression to IBM PC with floppy disks ...
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @12:26AM
Fortran IV. Punch cards. Timeshare on an IBM System/360. Chain printer.
Get off my lawn.
(Score: 2) by gznork26 on Friday January 05 2018, @01:12AM
My senior year in high school, 1968-9, a took a programming class. The district had acquired a DIGIAC-3080 computer: size of a desk, and it had a printer, 4k memory on a drum, card reader, tape reader/punch and bat switches. My first language was binary, which we entered with those bat switches. We punched assembler programs onto cards, then read in the assembler via tape. When we learned FORTRAN, we had to send them to the local college to be run.
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday January 05 2018, @01:34AM
Calculator. 7 segment display, 256 programming steps. The first significant program I wrote on it that I can remember was a "one-armed-bandit" style game which used the Hours/Minute/Seconds display for the 3 wheels. Still wonder how I not only managed to write that, but get it into the 256 steps. ZX-80 (not 81) and Apple II+ followed. Got the calculator confiscated in school (for hacking on it during class), in the course of which it got lost. Many years later, I went on an eBay shopping spree in the course of which I re-bought one of them - and all the other cool calculators (the Casio x02P series and a few of the classic HPs) I lusted for back then, too. :)
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday January 05 2018, @02:20AM
Back in 1975 when I was studying mechanical engineering, my school had a few terminals connected to a university computer somewhere. Not even a screen, it was a keyboard and printer combination. I don't recall what brand it was, maybe IBM. I had no background in electronics so it was all new to me. I learned to program in BASIC with it. A couple of years later a friend's father bought a CBM (Commodore Business Machine), like a PET but with a real keyboard. He didn't know how to program it so I taught him the BASIC that I had learned. Then I discovered assembler (6502), TTL logic, finally understood how it all worked. I got my own PET, modified it, moved on to 8088 and 68000 assembler, C and C++. Currently I like to code in Go. Never formally studied any of it, it's all self-taught.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday January 05 2018, @02:24AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Friday January 05 2018, @02:36AM (1 child)
As a kid, my Dad was at work almost every evening past when we went to bed. To make up for lost time, he instituted an hour each weekend for each kid (me and two brothers). I older brother wanted to learn the piano, my little brother just wanted to play Nintendo games, and I wanted to learn BASIC.
Learn I did, and now am at least moderately employed doing just that. Of course, this meant that I was drunk with power and money in the years I should have been finishing college. My brothers on the other hand, one has is a professor of mathematics, and the other has a masters of accounting.
The long take away is, Screw you Dad!
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday January 05 2018, @03:16PM
Okay. Sounds kind of nice...
But I don't get how you go from one to the other. That would not have been my takeaway had you not spelled it out.
I was drunk with something during those years too--finally got a degree in 2010 after starting college in 1987--but it wasn't power nor money.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Fnord666 on Friday January 05 2018, @05:04AM (1 child)
My first experience programming was similar. The school had one account with the local university that we all (3 of us!) shared. We had a decwriter teletype and a 300 baud acoustic modem. The account was on a pdp 11-70 and we programmed in BASIC. Every spring I made the trip up the the hallowed halls of the computer department , DECTape in hand to backup all of our work. The next fall, once we had begged enough and they gave us an account again, I went back to restore all of our files. I still have those tapes somewhere...
(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.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday January 05 2018, @12:30PM
I used to be keen on building electronic devices as a hobby. However, having to continually buy components meant the cost of my hobby was climbing all the time. So I convinced myself that a computer - which could easily be reprogrammed to do something entirely different without having to buy new components was the solution. So I bought a Nascom 1 in the early 1980s. 4K ram, half of which was required for the display, 4K ROM, and I had to use a tape recorder for storage. The computer had to be built from components, 1000s of soldered joints for the IC sockets, transistors, resistors etc. But I taught myself how to write Z80 assembly language.
A few years later and I had the opportunity to move into software professionally, as an Air Force officer providing support for the software in a military aircraft. I had to learn Fortran, then Algol, followed by CORAL66 and various proprietary languages used by the various manufacturers. Several years later I had the role of providing computer assisted training to officers undergoing their specialist training.
My career path then changed, but I have always kept at least a couple of computers around the home. Currently I have 8 desktops (7 x linux, 1 x Win7), 3 Raspberry Pi, 2 of which are permanently on, one as a server and the other provide aircraft tracking data for a radius of approximately 200 miles around my home, and I still write software both as OS to support others and in Python which is my current favourite.
Oh, and I've started interfacing my computers with homemade hardware again - so perhaps that early dream of reducing the costs of my hobby were just that - a dream.
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Friday January 05 2018, @01:09PM
I had a girlfriend around '94 and she picked up AFAIK the first linux cdrom commercially printed which was a SLS distro from Walnut Creek (The one that came on multiple sets of 1.44 meg floppy disks...) and she says "linux..." (pronouncing it correctly, OMG I love her she must be a closet unix hacker what a miracle we found each other) and she continues "... I wonder what these guys sound like?" (UGH!)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @01:34PM
Spent days typing code into the C128 (in C64 mode) from Compute!'s Gazette. That's probably where I discovered that touch typing skills would be useful. These days I have a hard time trying to type anything on a touch screen.
You can pry my keyboard from my cold dead hand!
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Friday January 05 2018, @07:20PM
I'm beginning to guess that this article is a disguised poll for "how old are you" :P
I was born a bit late to be programming on a C-64 as a home computer, even though my elementary school had plenty of them in the library. Instead, my first was a Texas Instruments console that could take input from the keyboard, cartridges, or audio tape. TI basic, programs typed in from magazines, the works. Saving/restoring programs to/from audiocassette was an experience I'm glad I suffered through, and am happy not to need to repeat.
Am I the only one who started out on a TI? I'm hoping there are a few other early gen-x types on here with me...
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @01:22AM
First hacks on a TI Spelling Bee, then touching department store computers, got an Amstrad CPC, learned BASIC, learned Z80 assembly to cheat and crack games, learned 8080 assembly to program in CP/M, learned Pascal because I got a compiler, tried Forth but wasn't disciplined enough yet, learned rudimentary 8086 assembly, learned C because now I had Unix, got discipline, learned Perl, looked at C++ with disgust, learned Java, learned Go, learned Ru...
(Score: 2) by clone141166 on Sunday January 07 2018, @12:48PM
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