Humble Beginnings
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I tinkered around when I was younger, learning how to program in 8th grade (1994) in Applesoft Basic on Apple II E computers. Shortly after I graduated from grade school, my parents got a computer and one of my uncles introduced me to Visual Basic. I played around with it, and the first program of mine that comes to mind is Address Keeper. I had started it as just an address tracking program for myself. Then I gave a copy to family and passed it on and had it available as freeware on NoNags
My first venture into VB came out as a VB app that pulled data from an Access database. I guess that should've been the sign that I'd have a thing for databases One of my most pointless programs that I wrote was at the end of an internship. I was helping a company migrate from Access to SQL Server. It was at the end of my summer there and work quickly trickled. So there I sat, in my nice corner office, bored as bored can be. I ended up writing my own version of Paint in VB. Boredom at its finest! And the finance intern came in and he laughed at that program I wrote... but he was jealous since I actually had little to do while he had a bit more to finish up before his time to go.
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Hey Paul, I wish I could say such things about my younger years. Unfortunately I didn't really start gaining enough understanding of computers to pull off such stunts until I was around 20 which was a couple years ago and I am too smart to try it now.
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My first program real program was a basic application on a TRS-80 to track yearbook sales for the librarian in my high school. As mentioned earlier, databases did not exist then and it was a chore to handle this. However, I did feel good about it.
College applications became steadily more progressive to include small applications that a friend and I did for local businesses. At times I wish I had continued to pursue that -- he did and is now semi-retired at 40 after selling his business.
Good question, Steve. We get to see that many of us started in the same way.
Regards,
Joe
Joe Johnson
NETDIO,LLC. -
the program that comes to my mind was a code we had written to predict the most possibility of number. it was a lottery game and the host used to pick up 6 numbers between 1 and 10. Me and my friends wrote a random generator and tried to see which numbers have highest possibility in one to ten. that was fun
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Sprites on an x86? What machine was that?
I almost blurted out C-128, but that had a Z-80 in it, didn't it? -
The first significant programs I wrote were both as a result of my having a ham radio licence. I built an ASCII keyboard from scratch (okay, I didn't build the keys) according to the plans in an electronics magazine. This was the first time I'd used wire-wrap, and it was a necessity due to the number of chips involved. Now that I had a keyboard, I wrote a Z80 machine-code program for my Micro Professor to change the ASCII output into morse code. Worked a treat. Soon afterwards I wrote a morse decoder and radio-fax decoders. By then I had advanced to assembler. My first professional program was written around 1980. It was a DEC Pascal database program for an LSI-11, based on an interesting storage structure that was described in Byte Magazine. The self-describing structure was scarily XML-like ... Have we really advanced at all?
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I wrote my first program in 1981, while still in high school. My math teacher offered a very basic computer science course (he was learning just ahead of the two students who enrolled in it).
I can't even remember the machine we used but I believe the language was BASIC.
Anyway, the program was used to track a hockey playoff pool (these are huge deals for us Canadians!). We had about 12 entrants and each had about 15 players selected. My program would accept inputs and spit out a sorted report showing the standings.
I've been hooked on programming ever since. Sure there have been times when I've thought of doing something completely different but I think I'd miss the creative thinking that programming brings.
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My first program that really did something was written on and for the TRS-80 Model I. At the time (1978), I was studying for my ham license and had a mental block on morse code. I decided to use the TRS-80 to generate random 5 character groups in morse code for me. I had been experimenting with the Z80 assembler for the trash 80 and discovered I could turn on and off the relay that normally turned on a tape recorded one could use for I/O on the TRS-80.
I had no printer, so debugging the program was especially difficult, since I would have to debug from the on-screen code listing. I had to be quite adroit at using the key (I forget which key) that caused the rapidly scrolling program listing to stop near the point I needed to review.
I finally got it completed and was able to do quite a good job of creating the code groups and sending each character out to the screen and also to the internal, electromechanical tape relay, which served as the "key" for a small, battery operated CPO (code practice ocsillator).
It made for a great practice tool and did quite nicely until, after so many open/close cycles of the relay, carrying the relatively high current in the code practice ocillator circuit, resulted in the relay's contacts being "welded" shut!
Nevertheless, I did successfully learn the code enough to take and pass the advanced class FCC license exam - code and all!
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In high school, circa 1985, I wrote a game in BASIC on an IBM PC. It was mostly a text game like Dungeons and Dragons. The user was told what the room was like and what was in it. It had a fight sequence as well and the computer took the role of the bad guy in the fight. The user could also pick up items and they were stored in a string. I learned a lot of string manipulation in the program.
Dave
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My first big one was where I took a joystick apart and conencted it to an 'Emergency' game. You know, the game where it's suppose to be an operating table and you have to remove bones from the patient without touching the sides. The patient's nose lit up red when the sides were touched with the tweezers that were attached to the board with a wire.
The computer sensed when the connection was made, told you which bone you had to remove, and kept score. I should have got a hold of whoever made the game and tried to sell them the idea, but I was only 13.
I wrote the usual D&D game, space invader's game, and pong games. I'm sure that I could think of more, but the Emergency game was the best idea that I actually took to completion.
Live to Throw
Throw to Live
Will Summers -
The game's name was Operation, not Emergency.
Live to Throw
Throw to Live
Will Summers -
I wrote a game once, for the BBC Micro - yes it was a long time ago. It was a maze game, where you had to move the cursor through a series of open gates. Passing though a gate closed it, with a weird sound effect that happened quite by accident. The idea was to close all the gates as fast as possible. The gates would randomly rearrange themselves, so no two games were ever the same, and if you took too long, random gates would re-open. It was written in FORTH and I still have a royalty cheque somewhere for the grand sum of £2.50.
After a break of about 10 years this experience helped me return to work, writing firmware for a small automotive company - in FORTH of course!
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How could I forget my mid-seventies APL program that played Blackjack? It was a graded requirement for my Language Structures undergrad class. I completed it quickly so that the rest of the examination lab class evening held at Huntington College in Indiana was now free. Did I mention every time the Ace of Spades was dealt my simple APL program blew up! Seems that had something to do with why it wasn't graded an "A+".
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Interesting topic to read. There's a great age split between those who began on pre-PC mainframes, those who began on the first personal computers (zx80, apple, commodore pet etc) and those who have only known Windows.
As an oldie I wonder if maybe we've lost something through the last half century with the standardisation on Windows (not forgetting the Apple Mac!). I've worked on many different operating systems and languages in the last thirty something years and all had their highs and lows.
We used to have a much deeper knowlege of the workings when we had to write memory management handlers to allow Reading Brewery's process control system to use more than 32K of memory and students today alone on their pc's don't have social cameraderie of the punch-room wait for job return and the random lottery of end-of-shift operators dropping their carefully ordered punchcards over the floor to avoid delaying their exit!
Have we lost something or gained?
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I agree - I think a lot of what's been lost is in low-level troubleshooting and low-level optimizations, since most of that has been abstracted away. A lot of the "youngsters" haven't been exposed to the concepts we grew up with, like the difference between one's complement and two's complement, or the difference in clock cycles between a shift left operation and a multiply by two instruction.
Mostly the low-level knowledge helps when you're trying to optimize code and when you're trying to differentiate between bugs in your code and bugs in the latest service pack DLL's.
Of course development is a lot easier when you don't have to worry about low-level details and write your own drivers and libraries for ... well ... everything!
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