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Yes I can but dose the guy who makes snowcones make snow man in his free time
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Compiled Basic? Luxury!
A BBC Basic interpreter is all anyone needs. 
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I haven't seen a BASIC interpreter for many years.
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In our Math/Informatics class, we also used Logo (but at that time, I already spoke C++). It was quite funny, actually. Especially since our teacher was a total douchebag.
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Logo is much better it uses FP
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... I started messing around with a trash 80 color my parents got as a gift I was 7 or 8. It's "OS" was the same Tandy Basic it was programmed with, blurring the line between the two heavily; and if the included manuals made a strict split between the parts that a normal user was supposed to read, and what only hard core geeks were supposed to care about, I didn't pick up on it at the time. At the time I never really went beyond for loops to create psuedo ascii art using block characters. I know I didn't grasp most of the advanced material; eg I remember after reading stuff like "Returns 0 if both parameters are 0, 1 otherwise" wondering WTH I could possibly use it for, or more generally WTH was boolean algebra in the first place. My initial forays with quick basic on the dos 6.0/486-25 computer bought around my 12th birthday never went much farther.
When I was 15 I registered for my HS's intro to programming class (turbo pascal). I went into the course with a massively swollen head, convinced that because I was "good with computers" and in the gifted program I should be able to coast to an easy A. It didn't help that the first few weeks of the class were almost as much of a joke as I was taking it as. Inevitably I crashed and burned.  It wasn't until about 6 or 7 weeks into the 9 week grading period that it really became apparent to me that I had gotten in over my head. Shortly after I realized I was in trouble my teacher/guidance councilor scheduled a meeting and because at that point it was too late to drop the course both recommended I just give up, take my F for the course, and use the remainder of the class as a study hall. If I really wanted (they didn't recommend it) I could register again next year and try again. Their opinion was that because each lesson built on the prior it would be impossible for me to recover because I couldn't understand the current lesson without the material I failed to learn previously. Both of them underestimated my stubbornness and missed that half the reason my written assignments scores were so bad was not that I was totally clueless (50 or 60% would be about right); but that my usual sloppyness was working against me when I didn't have compile errors to catch stupid errors. I managed to (if only just) get a passing grade for the quarter and finished out with A's by the end of the year. Towards the end of the year my teacher told me that in the 20ish years she'd been teaching the programming class that of the dozens of students who catastrophically screwed up at the start I was the only one who managed to recover and finish out with a passing grade. I never looked back from then. 
3x12=36
2x12=24
1x12=12
0x12=18
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My first computer was afore the afore-mentioned ZX81. A ZX80, in fact.
I had been coding before then using that good old standby pencil and paper, which I had to invent especially for the purpose because the chisel and rocks that the others used were too heavy for me.
Henry Minute
Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain
Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?"
“I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus!
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Did you have to stop when the bright thing in the sky disappeared, or did you guys have that bright-ouchy thing known as fire?
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Oddly enough I had a bit part in this[^] which appeared shortly after I got my first computer. I appear at about 28 seconds.
Henry Minute
Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain
Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?"
“I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus!
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Hardly recognized you there. I really need the soundtrack to that movie.
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I was 14 when my brother actually bought a little 8-bit Atari 600XL computer. Started on that, and then "upgraded" to a Atari 130XE with of all amazing things, a tape-drive for storage. Boy, do I wish I had kept those. They would be fun to look at once in a while.
I wasn't, now I am, then I won't be anymore.
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It was a few years later before I got my hands on a box.
But I had my own computer long before then.
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Marcus Kramer wrote: Boy, do I wish I had kept those
Take a look on ebay. I often get a surge of nostalga and would secretly like to start my own private collection of stuff from the 8 bit days, but be warned, things are nowhere near as good as you remember them. Tape-drive, wait five minutes for 20KB to load only to find the volume was bit too loud and you get some aggresive error message.
Regards,
Rob Philpott.
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With out degree, after finished a Diploma I came to my first job & that day all other people looked & smiled at me at the same time like in the movie Almost famous (because I was too young at that time[Even now, you can see me in my profile]). clickety[^](From 2:00 to 2:45).
I still remember their words from the past. "Hey check in that page kid", "Hey kid, don't be over smart", "Take care kid", "Never do that way...oops you right", etc.,  *Happiness* They have helped me a lot.
... I'm missing them..they are all in different location/countries by jobs. 
Will meet them soon in this year. 
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Life is changing, school, habits, social networking, I think that in ten years the new era of programmers will change this results drastically. I would like to see the same question in 10 years 
btw, I began with QBasic
luisnike19
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I could bear speak, but coding seemed such a natural way to express myself.
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Used a Teletype connected to the local college when I was at school, then onto a Research Machines 380Z, my first proper hands on machine.
ZX Spectrum and BBC to follow.
I also built a Northstar Polaris P1 in school.
This was all back in the Early 80's.
At college it was an IBM 370, then the early PC's before moving to an AS400.
After that it was windows all the way!
------------------------------------
I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave
CCC League Table Link
CCC Link[ ^]
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I started with an ASR33 Teletype with tape punch and reader and a 75 baud modem with acoustic couplers on a bakelite telephone. We used time share on a GEC mainframe in Manchester.
The input data files were punched on paper tape. If you forgot to punch 3 nulls after each carriage return and line feed, the head printed backwards over the previous line on its way back to the left-hand side. That must have been late 1979 or very early 80s. I was engineering a winding engine for a coal mine at the time.
When we got a 300 baud modem, hard-wired to the phone line, we thought it was the dogs b******s.
Then we got spoiled with an LSI11 actually in the office and glass VT100 terminals running at 2400 baud. Oh bliss!
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I remember those 380Z's - my mum brought one back from her school over a school holiday's and I started programming there.
After that, the ZX81, Spectrum and BBC's were, in a way, a step backward (I maybe didn't realise at the time), but the 380Z was more DOS-like than those older "home computers".
Also remember early experience with 370's and AS/400, thankfully by then I was already the PC-guy in the company (Turbo C++ and MS C 6.0), so didn't waste too much time on the RPG everyone else worked with. Did have to learn them enough to port some projects though, I still shudder at the memory of RPG.
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My first real computer was a Altair 8800[^] in 1977, I was in college and had just bought a nice slide rule for
one of my classes and bumped into one my teaches that said I could borrow this computer.
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Mike Hankey wrote: just bought a nice slide rule
I've still got two of those! (And I surprised myself by remembering how to use one)
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together.
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Amazing little sticks. Mines been gone for years and it would be hard to replace I'm thinking, even if
I did have a notion to own one.
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You prompted me to check FleaBay, and not only can you buy one there easily, but I found the exact make and model of one of mine - at £29.99! I think this is one of the few times in my life when I have bought something, used it, and then could sell it for a profit... 
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together.
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Now that amazes me not only did I not think you could purchase/find one anymore but to pay such a price?
Who would have thought? I think at the time I paid $7-$10 dollars for mine and only because I got a
better quality/fancy one.
The things that make you say hmmm, hmmm?
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