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Learned DECBasic in 1973 at High School. PDP-8e w/ 8k hand wired core memory, Four Teletype terminals sharing that memory and punched paper tape. I wrote a program to punch out mini banners on that paper tape that was quite a hit. The following year there were other students trying to take credit for writing it - but I had formatted the code in a quirky way so the teacher knew better.
Since then I've done small bits of programming in over a dozen languages but never as a full-time coder or developer, so my knowledge in that area is a mile wide but only a few inches deep.
First real experience was paper tape and a teletype on my first job I wrote a program to calculate spring parameters. Then fooled around with Visual Basic to design a golf league program for a spreadsheet.
I remember programming jingle bells in octal; output the program as a punch paper tape; and listened to the console bell play the tune. Ahhhhhh.
Pax vobiscum, Mark Rabideau - ManyRoads Genealogy -or- eirenicon llc. (geeky stuff)
i3wm, bspwm, hlwm, dwm, spectrwm ~ Linux #449130
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
My introduction to computers was via a "Casio FX 770p" programmable calculator. It allowed you to make & store a number of simple programs in BASIC. I think my program for Ohm's Law was likely the first useful thing that I managed to do with it.
Then a year on in 1987 I got myself one of the first crop of Amiga 500's to arrive in Oz. That computer changed my life dramatically forever. I ended up writing AmigaDOS tutorials & software reviews in creator/editor Tim Strachan's magazine on disk "Megadisc". We had no internet in those days, & Megadisc was, for those in the know, highly regarded around the world. No advertisements, just high quality, useful contributions from Amiga freaks. They were good old days. :)
I got to review (& as was the case, keep the $300+ software package) the last version of CanDo. CanDo is really the only programming language that I have ever learned. I've looked & found no equal to it. I spent ~6 months of long days/nights & wrote myself a directory utility that was very similar to Jonathon Potter's Directory Opus (DOpus) v4.*. except mine didn't have the built in configuration utility. So any changes that I needed to make had to be programmed in. I made a simple text editor & image viewer that were attached to the dirutil. It was all so much fun. Teaching myself to program was so stimulating, challenging & satisfying.
For anyone interested, a very good write up of CanDo can be found here:
After Commodore finally finished killing off the Amiga, in that incredibly long drawn out & painful way. I ended up on Win 3.11 briefly before Win95 was finally released. I went & bought Visual Basic in the hope that it would be similar to CanDo. I spent some time with it & decided it was a most horribly ugly piece of software & sold it.
I've learned what I've needed to do jobs that I wanted to do writing scripts in Bash. But my days of learning languages are certainly over now... These days, if I had the enthusiasm (which I don't) I'd likely learn Python. Won't happen.
Last edited by handy on Mon Dec 24, 2018 6:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
I remember typing Fortran programs on punch cards and then taking them to the huge air-conditioned computer room. It seems the computer took up pretty much the whole floor, and computer time was pretty dear, made worse by the fact that most of my programs seemed to turn out to be infinite loops taking up eons of computer time and spitting out miles of paper.
Gordon Cooper wrote: Sat Dec 22, 2018 11:33 pm
I met punched paper tape
Now I don't feel so old. Dot Matrix Paper is about a far as I go. I remember typing out a game code out of Ahoy! magazine for the Commodore 64. But I had a earlier PC before hand and that was the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A with the Dot Matrix Paper printer.
My dad transformed an old calculator (the kind with the roll of paper!) so I could enter the data lines with one keypress and then I could use the numeric keys for the numbers.
And then the thing wouldn't run and you'd have to wait for the next edition to get the errors out. GAH!! But the satisfaction when stuff finally WORKED.. heaven!
MX-23.6_x64 July 31 2023 * 6.1.0-37amd64 ext4 Xfce 4.20.0 * 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 2700
Asus TUF B450-Plus Gaming UEFI * Asus GTX 1050 Ti Nvidia 535.247.01 * 2x16Gb DDR4 2666 Kingston HyperX Predator
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