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I started playing at about 7, with a cartridge atari, playing games with the joysticks and paddles, then begged for a 48k zx speccy rubber keyed. Think i spent the next 2/3 years typing in programs from the mags you could buy, and a mag called INPUT, that would show listings for various machines to program in. From then I collected various spectrums, ie. 128k +2, 128k +3, then baught an Electron and a commordore 64. Then I saw an advert for a Sam Coupe (sort of in between a spectrum and an Amiga), but the company 'Miles Gordon Technolodgy' when bust after about 2 years sadly, I think it was a great little machine with loads of potential, and it got me into writing assembler. Then I baught an Amiga500, then an Amiga500+ and an Atari500, stayed with them for a couple of years, and then baught my first PC, a Packard Bell 25Mhz 2Mb ram Executive PC! lol. Never looked back since. But I do enjoy playing with the emulators for the speccy now and again 
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I would say that those of us who grew up alongside 8-bit computers were very fortunate to have the oportunity to learn so much stuff at the nuts&bolts level. (I am now an embedded systems programmer by trade using a 32-Bit TriCore DSP for most work, but playing with 8-bit micros when I was a kid in the 80's taught me things I still use every day).
To have a computer that booted in 1/2sec straight into a BASIC interpreter was very cool. To be able to take the lid off and have a chanse of understanding it is something you just don't get today. Compare our "toybox" to the computing world available to kids wanting to learn the important low-level stuff today - they're abstracted from the hardware, the processor and memory quite a long way.
For this reason I've kept all my old 8-bit computers  (C16, Electron etc.) just incase my kids (if and when!) show some inclination towards computer programming.
Sam W.
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Once I got my C=128 I started doing some real, actual, honest-to-goodness programming in BASIC 7.0 (written by Microsoft! ). My biggest and most ambitious app was an equation grapher. (This was looooong before you could buy graphing calculators.)
I did some neat tricks like automagically figuring out the scaling of the axes so the graph would fit on the screen; and self-modifying code so you could enter "2*X^2-4X+1" at an INPUT prompt, and the program would insert that text into itself as a custom function. There were also the standard speed tricks like putting subroutines at the beginning of the program, so the BASIC interpreter would find them faster (when you did, say GOSUB 200, it did a brute-force search from line 1 looking for 200  )
Since this all ran in BASIC, it was slooooow, and C= BASIC limited variable names to two chars, so the code was unreadable (comments? yeah right)  ... but still it was pretty neat.
I wrote up an article and submitted it to Compute's Gazette (a mag that covered C= computers) but they didn't accept it. 
--Mike--
Ericahist | CP SearchBar v2.0.2 | Homepage | 1ClickPicGrabber | RightClick-Encrypt
You cannot stop me with paramecium alone!
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Yes, I had a little rotating 3D cube program published in a mag about Logo (remember the one with the turtle that could draw pictures). This would have been mid-late 80's.
Sam W
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I got published in a small newsletter, CUGOM (Commodore user group of Montreal).
We could exchange diskettes of stuff we worked on against demos and shareware.
I didn't know it at first, but I got selected for a "one liner" contest: the most fun program we
could write in basic that would fit on 1 line.
I won that contest! It was an animation of a pyramid using "keyboard graphics". It could only be typed in by using the "two letters" abbreviated basic keywords.
I remember that for the last two characters, I could not ":goto 0" "g" "shift o" "0" because that would overflow the maximum of 80 characters for a line in basic. I had to "r" "shift u" (for run) to enable the endless loop.
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i created a formula evaluator, too... but no graph function yet... QueueUserAPC...
Don't try it, just do it!
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I had a BASIC article in an early MacTutor.
I had a couple Tech tips in Windows Developer's Journal (when it used to be called Tech Specialist - in its early days).
I had one on programming the parallel port directly from MS-DOS in an embedded programming journal (don't even remember the name of that magazine).
I tried for one on OWL (Object Windows Library) for Borland C++ in Tech Specialist, but the article was too long. Another reason to contribute to CodeProject - no article length limits!
Now I just hang out and lurk, occasionally commenting or submitting something to CodeProject. It is less financially rewarding to do so, but more psychologically rewarding.
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Michael Dunn wrote:
I wrote up an article and submitted it to Compute's Gazette (a mag that covered C= computers) but they didn't accept it
I submitted a couple of things to various publications, sadly none ever got used. I've still got the rejection letters somewhere.
Michael
But you know when the truth is told,
That you can get what you want or you can just get old,
Your're going to kick off before you even get halfway through.
When will you realise... Vienna waits for you? - "The Stranger," Billy Joel
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I was about 6-7 and my pops got it for my brother (who is 3 years older than me). But he used it a few times but it never got him.... it hit my stimulus HARD CORE! I would steal it all the time and screw around with it. Then came the Vic-20.. then it died.. then I Got another one and then.. I got an 8086 with a monochrome screen that was awesome.
Ahh ya... I was in grade 8 showing my classmates how I made graphics on the Vic-20. People were downright amazed by it..... geeks rule!
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By the time we got some C64's at school I could write a fun little space race game in about 1 minute and 3 or 4 lines of BASIC. Other kids were amazed, but the teacher was not happy!
Brad Williams
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HAHAHA ya I used to do those in BASIC on the Apple II. People were like "whoa he's like a rockstar".. and I'm like "no.. better!"
hahhahah
<geeks> rule!
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Did anyone started with that "thing" ...
My brother was going to buy an MSX and in the shop they tell him "well... we don't have MSX we have MZ that is better" XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD... well... we have to learn programming... not very good games to play with that machine....
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at the age of 8 my father introduced me in programming visual basic because he had to code a small database for his company(he isn't a coder), i was very interested and started coding own small screensavers
at the age of 12 vb became extremly boring (and slow - i had a AMD 486 at that time  ), and after coding little games using vb i started coding visual c++, the one and only 
some "limitations" made it necessary to learn assembler and PHP... i was bored, so there were also some other languages like perl or java i was learning.
Don't try it, just do it!
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me 2, i started programming at 8, our school was teaching GWBasic since the 3rd grade, nothing more than input and output, but i got really excieted, and started to read books, then basic wasn't fun anymore, so i went after C/C++ which is the greatest ever!
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I was 8 too, but I started with Quick Basic...
Now I'm using Visual C++ 6.0
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Oh, man. That was way back when the years weren't numbered! I also played with: Sinclair Z80, Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer and Commodore 64. My first PC was a Tandy 1000: 4.77Mhz 8080 w/64K of ram... it was the real deal baby!
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution - Robert Sewell
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Old good times... I gues not many of you remember the ancient mainframe machine like that with 4k x 45 bits RAM running as fast as 20000 op/s! That was my first comp with ALGOL-60 and "autocode" (a predecessor of assembler).
Eddie Velasquez wrote:
Tandy 1000: 4.77Mhz 8080
Well, your Tandy was an advanced device! As far as I remember the genuine Intel 8080 was 2 MHz. When they introduced the 8085 @2.5 MHz we said "Wow! It's cool! It's fast!"
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brownfox wrote:
Well, your Tandy was an advanced device! As far as I remember the genuine Intel 8080 was 2 MHz.
Well, you know... I was braggin'!
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution - Robert Sewell
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From 4th-6th grade I attended the elementary school that my grandmom taught at, and she was my ride to/from school, so I often was stuck at school for 2-3 hours after classes ended. When I was in 4th grade (or maybe 5th, I forget which) there was an after-school class in the library teaching basic BASIC on Apple //e's. Oh the excitement! Graphics!
Later that year, for open house (a night-time thing where parents came to visit the school and classrooms) I wrote a cheezy little "welcome to open house" program, complete with stick-figure house and opening door.  Hey, by 1981/82's technology standards it was pretty bloody cool
--Mike--
Ericahist | CP SearchBar v2.0.2 | Homepage | 1ClickPicGrabber | RightClick-Encrypt
Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
I think so Brain, but if we shaved our heads, we'd look like weasels!
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yeah, that technology rocked!!!
it's a pity that i was born in '86  assembler in the 80s would have been really funny.
Don't try it, just do it!
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I'm always too late... *CRY*!!!!
Don't try it, just do it!
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hmmmm, never heard of this movie... i have to check if i can get it here in germany.
Don't try it, just do it!
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Yeah I started on one also. Had the "offical" TI Tape Cassette. The voice synthesizer mod package and went through at least 4 sets of game controls. no game like Parsec!!! I was pissed when I found out my parents gave it away.
Cheers,
-Erik
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