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16 in 1973; FORTRAN IV on punch cards, in a high-school-level class taught at the community college. Finding prime numbers, finding the zeros of polynomials, computing the minimum number of coins to equal some number of cents -- as hundredths of a dollar $0.01 -- and learning about the imperfection of REAL numbers: SHOCKING!
My typing skills were non-existent, and it took me a looong time to plonk out a 30-card stack, after having already composed everything on a coding sheet. No backspace key on a key punch.
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To be fair, it should be also noted the birth date ... when I was 7 or 12 home computer didn't existed ...
However I wrote my first functioning programs on a ZX Spectrum in 1982, at the age of 16.
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22.
But that was 43 years ago. I'd never seen a computer before I was 21.
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I was 18 (1976) and using a HP25 (programmable calculator: HP25).
Dirk Verheijke
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In 1979, at a Radio Shack store. It was
10 print "hello";
20 goto 10
I was 11. My dad had been to a BASIC programming class for work, and he showed me what to do.
--Geoff
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14 in 1973 - 300 baud dialup on an ASR-33 to a HP-2000C timeshare refrigerator. Integer basic. 8K ram with 100K of personal storage (not including punched paper tape!) I still have my copy of Star Trek on blue tape!
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14, 1968, IBM 1620, Fortran-IId
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I was 12. The language was BASIC and the system was a good old Honeywell H1642 time sharing system. We had limited storage so we saved our code using paper tape from an ASR-33 teletype. We were also able to use a Honeywell 316 mini-computer by installing the BASIC interpreter. How did we load it? By going to the H316's front panel and entering the "key in loader" instructions in binary using the rocker switches. The interpreter was a large spool of paper tape.
Man we thought we were so cool. 
I graduated to Fortran and assembly after that (anyone remember DAP?)
Allan Dianic
Sr. Systems Engineer
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We were cool... then. now we're just old.
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25; mainframe in college (course of study: math). That was 31 years ago ...
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10. TI-Basic on a TI-99/4A back in 1981. Still miss it.
And, as much as I would like to say 'I have been coding since I was 10', I actually took a break from 1984-98 to pursue sound engineering. Worked creating music on a Mac during the 90's and then came back to programming in 1998. Miss the music, too.
Memories...
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone - Bjarne Stroustrup
The world is going to laugh at you anyway, might as well crack the 1st joke!
My code has no bugs, it runs exactly as it was written.
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15, in 1969. I was a Grade 11 high school student.
Language was FORTRAN IV using the WATFOR compiler, machine was an IBM 360/50 mainframe at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
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Do you mean wrote the program down on paper and then created the punch cards? I was about 13 and it was about 1973. It was a Monroe Calculator that was programmable like computers. They had special worksheets that you wrote your program down on. And then hand punched cards to match the worksheet.
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15. My High School had a Teletype terminal with paper tape punch/reader connected via 300 baud modem to a GE Timesharing mainframe and we programed in a dialect of BASIC that required line numbers.
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10 years old - Coleco Adam writing code in SmartBasic!
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8, BASIC on a VIC-20 in 1982.
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I was about 8, after getting a TRS"Trash"-80 for Christmas. Writing in good old Basic. Goto's and all.
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5/6 years old, on Basic on a Sinclair's Z80 Clone
I'm on a Fuzzy State: Between 0 an 1
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9 years old in 1971 - my Dad was taking a course and showed me how to fill out "bubble cards" (computer cards that you filled in circles in pencil rather than punched them out) in Fortran:
program add
print *, "7 + 5", 7 + 5
end
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1971, eleven - timesharing basic on a PDP-8, and some weird s**t assembler for an old phillips bunny hopper machine that had been donated to my school in pieces - we rebuilt the sucker, learned to bootstrap it by trial and error, and wrote lots of adventure/star trek type games.
Ah! real programming with grease under the fingernails! and yes, at first, smoke tests really were.
you young turks really have it easy these days  .
Nothing is impossible, we just don't know the way of it yet.
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15 years old, in high school, using an ASR33 Teletype connected at an amazing 110 baud to a Univac 1106 (with FASTRAND drum instead of disk, that oughta date it). Language was something new called Dartmouth BASIC. Second semester we moved to FORTRAN and punched cards, third semester was ALGOL. The Univac was given to the school district as surplus from the early Apollo work by a local NASA contractor.
Then I would go home at night and do my Calculus homework on stone tablet using a flint chisel......
Jack Peacock
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I became a software engineer a little later than most of you, probably. I started out as a hardware technician back in the '70s after a 6 year stint in the Army but had a serious interest in the software side of things. Especially since I could see that I wouldn't be "fixing" computers too much longer as everything started to become more modularized. All I was was a highly trained "board swapper" at the end.
So, in 1980 I made the big jump to becoming a programmer. My first job was as a hardware diagnostics developer. A natural beginning for someone who was hardware-centric for over a decade. I gradually moved to being a firmware developer (another natural progression) until the late '90s when I made the jump to more business-related programming, which I am still doing today.
Along the way I migrated from assembler to Clipper for dBase to C to HTML to Classic ASP to VB6 to .NET VB and C#. So I'm basically a jack of all trades (and master of most!!)
And with the data side of things, from dBase II to Microsoft Access to SQL Server and Oracle.
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on Atari Basic, with 5.25" floppy disk, Atari 2600 console.
using the "Atari User Manual", howww...along time ago!, I was like 11.great days!!!!!  
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12 in QuickBASIC
14 Turbo c++
CPallini wrote: You cannot argue with agile people so just take the extreme approach and shoot him.
:Smile:
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