Humble Beginnings
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When I was 19 (1983) I tried writing banking software on an Applie IIe to track how much money I was saving. Parts of it worked, but I gave up after realizing a Corvette was out of the question!
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Speaking of TRS-80, we wrote a baseball game, based on randomized result when you would hit the ball. The only interaction was with the pitcher, you could trow a curve, slow pitch, fast ball. You then see the ball go on the field, everything from a birds eye view.
We had to work with the enormous amount of memory at the time (8k and one had 16K...wow!), we had to remove blank spaces from the code and at the end of one game, we would be left with 500 Bytes...lots of fun back then!!
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I wrote a horseracing program on a 48K zx Spectrum from Sinclair, for the guys at the office who where playing the ponies, that predicted winners with a 60% accuracy (much better than they were doing). The storage device was an old tape recorder. I still have the zx Spectrum and the code on cassette.
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My first program I wrote was in 1970 ish written in CECIL
using simple commands like IN and OUT and did basic maths calculations. It was for one of my school exams 
Not very interesting though
One of my better earlier accomplishments
was to write pure assembler in hex (no compiler) to supplement XPJC on mainframe computerFar away is close at hand in the images of elsewhere.
Anon. -
I first learned programming at a college in Nebraska in 1969. It was a Fortran class. The college had a keypunch machine but no computer. We would write our program, keypunch the cards, then once a week drive 25 miles to another college in Omaha that had an IBM 1130 we leased time on. My first program was a waveform analysis program that would calculate the correlation between a given waveform and sine waves of different frequencies. In effect it was a crude spectrum analysis program. It was a way to tie together an assigment for the programming class and my math major (and I think the program actually worked). The next semester I was a TA for the class.
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Hi All,
3 programs came up to my mind, all of them were writen in the University, one was a speed disk written in assembler for x86 architecture, the second one written in Pascal and was a file compressor if my mind doesn't fool on me (as ussual
) was using hoffman trees.And the last one but the one I liked the most was a game where I drive a tank, you have to shoot some flags bewaring of not shooting mines, also it has two bars that were moving verticaly you can't touch. This was written also in assembler using sprites.
Kindest Regards,
@puy Inc
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Like many others, I started on a dial-up line from school to the local polytechnic/college. We used one of the old golf-ball teletypes via a 300-baud acoustic coupler modem that was in a nice polished wooden box with a posh red felt lining. Amazing. One of the first programs we ever wrote was a simplistic tele-tennis program. Yep, even on a paper-filled teletype! Only 15 lines long in plain old-style BASIC, it's still etched in my memory. In fact, this must be about it's 34th anniversary - it was in the spring term just after Easter in 1972, when I was 12! We even ended up betting on the outcome. Here it is for posterity; but it runs faster today than it did then, so you lose the sense of suspense... enjoy!
Tim
10 let score1 = 0
20 let score2 = 0
30 print "ping"
40 if rnd(1) > 0.3 then 90
50 let score1 = score1+1
60 print score1 " - " score2
70 if score1 > 20 then 150
80 goto 30
90 print "pong"
100 if rnd(1) > 0.3 then 30
110 let score2 = score2+1
120 print score1 " - " score2
130 if score2 > 20 then 150
140 goto 90
150 end
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My first program was on a commodore 64 and I used it to design model airplane, based on engine size (hp), the type of plane and some other parameters it calculated all the dimensions in relation to the CG. I continued to work on it and added modules which allowed you to design wings in all sorts of shapes and sizes, it also calculated the airfoil flow from one end of the wing (tip) to the middle part (root). You could even mix and match the airfoils and it would interpolate the "new" airfoils in between.
The final addition came when I got my hands on an AutoCAD version with autolisp, can't remember if that was 9 or 2.6. I used my program to generate autolisp files wich would draw the all calculated airfoils.
I still carry a printout of the program around whenever I move to a new house but never got to it to turn it into Windows app.
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I wrote a program which calculates the week day of a given date inputted by user in basic using a sharp calculator.
Then I wrote a game "Master Mind"
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A kino game that used to run on a line printer.
Then, for real, I was in charge of internationalization at Smith Corona. We wrote our code in 8051 assembly language, and wrote our prompts with DB 'asdf'; statements (with constants added in for 8 bit Ascii). No way in hell that we could teach translators that format, and if we typed it in ourselves, we inevitably messed it up (like when I got hand-written Russian, in Cyrillic script, not print).
I created a compiler that let the people just type it into a text file. That saved so much aggravation, it's not funny.
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When I was in High School I wrote a pascal program for my dad to use at work. You would impute the certain aspects of a roll of steel, such as density, thickness, width, and it would give you all kinds of stats, like total weight, lenth unrolled, stuff like that. If memory serves me he actually used it.
Also when I was in high school I wrote an alarm clock for Windows in Delphi. You could select a wav or a MIDI file to play as the sound to alert you. I used it for the first year in college to awake me from my afternoon nap before one of my classes (didn't want to reset my actual alarm since I used it in the morning). I would always hear a MIDI of the Simpsons theme song when it was time to wake up, or a Krusty the Clown laugh over and over. I lost it when I rebuilt windows and didn't think to back it up before reformatting 🙁
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I have fond memories of my first program. I was 11 and wrote a combination text adventure (Zorkesque) with occassional graphic adventure sections called The World of Scum. It was in Basic on my first computer, the POWERFUL Atari 400 with tape backup, which rarely gave a good backup. I rewrote sections of that game many times, but it was lots of fun, and taught me a lot... and most importantly pushed me into a career path.
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I have been laughing out loud reading these. Thanks for the topic, Steve.
David.Poole's post cracked me up. My mother was rather the opposite, as she RETYPED at least 30 feet of thermal-printed AppleSoft after I destroyed my first program thinking it was in memory when it wasn't. I blew away both my working copy and my backup. It was an inventory program from my job "in a previous life". I was literally sick to my stomach. (And, spaghetti anyone?)
To Peter Shire. My Dad has been playing those first "Random" numbers for what has to be 25 years? He hasn't won, yet, but he still mentions--and ribs me for--those numbers.
- Jeff -
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This bring back too many dark memories! I worked on IBM 360/370 mainframe hardware when I was in high school - installs and upgrades mostly. One thing we needed to do often was to rewind the diagnostic tape. Being lazy (laziness is the key to productivity) we would clear core (sometimes it really was core), modify location 0 in memory with the following code, and hit the 'start' button.
07000700 9C000580
The first two 0700s are NOPs and the 9C000580 is a Start-IO to device 580 (or wherever your tape is mounted). The next instruction is 0000 which causes an exception and since the exception pointer is 0 the whole thing loops. The trick here is that the channel-control word is pointing to 0 so the I/O controller fetches the I/O command 07000700 and shoves it to the device. The first part of the command (0700) is a rewind operation and the second 0700 is a byte count which is ignored.
Told you it was dark. Now I need therapy (or just more coffee).
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When I was 16 (or so), my friends and I used to play a space age role playing game called "Traveller". I was usually the game master. I wrote a program to randomly generate planet specifications in BASIC on a teletype after school. When I was done writing it, I just let it run over-night and ended up with hundreds of planets for my universe. The teacher was not too happy about the huge pile of paper in the morning in his room, but at least he realized I was learning something in the process.
Anyone ever try whistling into the old modems to see if you could get the teletype to type anything?
So long, and thanks for all the fish,shang
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