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Those were the days of BASIC!
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In High School (in the 80s) I used BASIC (with PEEKs and POKEs) to make a square dance around a monitor. I was hooked. Then I went to community college thinking that I could continue my education and took the only CS class available: COBOL. That was the death knell for me. It taught me that "grown up" programming was hideously boring. It would be 15 years before I finally circled back around re-discovered my passion for development.
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In HS in the 80s, learned BASIC, and then DEC Basic Plus,
then Cobol (uggh), and Fortran (meh). Macro-11 Assembler (wow).
Wrote my first Run Time System (like a shell), learned how Octal Machine
codes worked.
Disassembled portions of the DEC OS (RSTS/E) as my final exam in the class.
Patched the OS to add hidden files [For some reason, I could logon when
logons were disabled, and I never needed to know a password. LOL]
I was sooo hooked.
Landed my first job at 19 on PDP-11/70s and loved every minute of it.
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Ahhh, the peeks and pokes, you've taken me back, my friend.
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Started using Commodore BASIC in 1980 in high school, then self taught on 6502 Assembler.
That got me started... went to community college and took business administration - electronic data processing. The course name changed to Programmer Analyst the following year.
BASIC, VAX Assembler, PASCAL, COBOL, RPG at college. Self taught C on a Commodore 64.
Then, started using Fotran at work, and mixed in a little C.
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My first job in 1965 involved using a Monroe desk calculator to analyze the output of a large Fortran program running on an IBM 7094. This seemed stupid, so I learned Fortran, wrote a back-end to the program, and changed my profession from mathematician to developer. After that, I regressed, using various assemblers before switching to Pascal and then to C. But I still hae a soft spot for quaint old Fortran IV.
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I really started programming with CPL for PR1MOS which was bit like a BAT file for Windows.
On the PR1ME we used a CAD system called Medusa which had a programming language called Supersyntax that I also used extensively.
Both of these are what got me hooked. Both would probably be horrible these days though..
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I became a developer to pay for an addiction,
food, I'm addicted to food.
Also to keep my wife from leaving me, I needed income. Luckily, I discovered I had an aptitude and liked developing software.
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I was working as a conservationist on a nature reserve and someone gave me a copy of VB3 to play around with. Two years later I was an employed developer and I have never looked back. Nothing else gives me the same buzz as programming.
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My high school had the good fortune to receive an IBM mini mainframe back in the very early 80s. I had exposure to writing very simple BASIC code on cards that had to be fed into a reader. The very fact that I could get this big thing to spit out something intelligent (relatively speaking) was very eye-opening to me. I got my parents to spring for a TRS-80 not long after and I spent many long hours typing in code from computer magazines and getting it to run. I was instantly hooked and went on to study computer science as a profession.
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C was the language that push me to development. I remember the first time I could print something from my very own programm, it felt amazing.
Happily I still programming in C for microcontrolers
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"Black magic performed by person or persons unknown..."
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant Anonymous ----- The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine Winston Churchill, 1944 ----- I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy. Me, all the time
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It was the HP41-C calculator that got me hooked, then Turbo Pascal.
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I remember watching the Project Gemini[^] launches when I was little. While I thought the rockets and the astronauts were cool, what really caught my eye was the amazing equipment used in Mission Control to keep track of everything.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Real machines you could get your head round.
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Yes Siree!
I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.
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Right on! My first micro had Z80 on an S100 bus machine. There was no clock, so I put one together on an S100 scratch board - my first and last venture into hardware!
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It was a toss-up between PL/I or COBOL running on networked CP/M machines. Having experienced COBOL at university I decided to try something different when it came to work (recently created IT department where the junior programmer got to choose the development tools). It served us very well for a long time (well, 3 years or so) until the IBM PC's came along. I do miss using WordStar as an editor; it was the only way of editing files larger than 32k (if I recall correctly).
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Though strictly speaking it was AutoLisp via AutoCAD. But later Common Lisp and then Scheme really made me "love" to program just for the sake of programming. They're still my 1st joyous language group, and I've worked on many from C++ through Java, Delphi, C#, F#, Python, etc.
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It was an amazing experience while I created my first windows form application with buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons by just drag-n-drop the controls on the window form!
Regards,
DD
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I had the same feeling
Except it was with VB 5
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
----
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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Regards,
DD
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I remember being blown away by VB 1.0. That was the first IDE to offer such a simple development model. Shame the language was a bit limited.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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