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Did you start with BASIC ? This pic came from "The Philosophy of FORTH", a system that I tried instead of BASIC - ended up learning Pascal
instead of either.

I have that t-shirt.... I actually started a 'tad earlier' with punch paper tape, magnetic stripe ledgers and gp300 assembler language. The first program I wrote was in 128 words of memory using punch paper tape with memory overlays for Broadalbin Central School District in Broadalbin NY.....

I met punched paper tape well before meeting binary arithmetic. The communications team used punched tape for both teletypes and morse when I started work in the NZ Weather Service. Could read the Morse tapes but never really got to grips with the 5 hole code. Fifteen years later was inducted
into the mysteries of IT. Was given a few months to learn the basics then spent a few years teaching technicians the basics of digital maths, Boolean Algebra etc. along with an introduction to solid state electronics. After years of analogue and vacuum tubes, my employer the NZ CAA (not unlike FAA
in USA), had suddenly realised the impending revolution to using transistors and counting in twos instead of tens. A group of us were moved out of the fixit group into a training team. Being first there, I was lumbered with the basics, but have never regretted it. First program I wrote was in machine
language.

Now I understand why GOTO was frowned upon --
it might lead to parts unknown. :)

I learned Pascal by a so-called extramural course. Most of it by correspondence, then two weeks at the University for our practical, real pressure cooker approach. We were drilled into thinking that Pascal was the only way to go. One lecturer was definitely anti_C. We were told that programming in C was easy but one could easily make mistakes and shoot oneself in the foot! Furthermore we were told that C++ was an improvement, but if we made an error, any shooting in the foot with C++ resulted in blowing your whole bl.... leg off. I never studied C !

Odd that GOTO is permitted in Pascal and if used rarely and correctly it can solve a few problems.

I learnt some Apple basic as a kid, with the Apple II.

Goto was a legitimate command there.

goto is also a legitimate command in C and of course C++ its use is discouraged though. And it's actually not a new evolution, Dijksra wrote about this before I was born in 1968, here's an analysis of his letter: http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html

We were forbidden to use GOTO when working in Pascal, I was a bit lucky in that I had not really used BASIC so had not developed the habit. FORTH was interesting but I was too lazy to work with it. I understand that it has been used for control of telescopes in astronomy. The way that FORTH was structured ruled out use of GOTO.

LOL That image!! Sure brings back memories of the commodore days for me hahaha

He should have used GOSUB so had a way to return

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.

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:

https://randocity.com/2018/03/27/cando- ... nt-page-1/

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.

Speaking of 95, I still have some floppies lying around with win 95 on them. Lol

God, I just realised that I said 2007 when I the truth was 1987 when I bought my first Amiga computer! doh! lol Getting old is great isn't it?

Someone still remember Fortran? I met him at university. Otherwise Happy 37th Birthday Commodore 64! https://twitter.com/PaulieHughes/status ... 8241589249

zoli62 wrote: Sat Jan 12, 2019 12:52 am Someone still remember Fortran? I met him at university. Otherwise Happy 37th Birthday Commodore 64! https://twitter.com/PaulieHughes/status ... 8241589249

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.

Oh man.. typing out a game...

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!

Very early in the programs I typed out in that way on my ZX-81 & later on the C=64, were disassembler programs so a) I could see why the other programs weren't running & b) Modify some software to support my printer.

In the late 70s I worked on a Compupro. Z80 cpu, and 64 k of ram!!! Running CP/M 2.2. Software I used: dBase II, Supercalc, and Wordstar. Those were the days. Still get nightmares about: Bdos Error on A: The "famous" error code.... Did some Mbasic an later on tried Turbo pascal. But then MicroSoft killed CP/M. Bought myselfs a ZX80 later.
at the office they went to PC/MSDos. Took me about 3 years before I had a PC compatible(El Cheapo) at home. Started with Windows 2.03 till Windows 10. Got rid of it somewhere in october last year. So here I am. Good old days.... :-)

I was 16 in the late 80's when I first had the chance to use a PC. They were IBM PC/XT compatibles. PCs had either 512 K or 640 K memory, and hard drives were not common (30 MB were the typical capacities). We did use 720 KB diskettes (floppies). I remember trying to collect all versions of DOS and managed to get copies of versions 2.x, 3.3 (most common), 4.01, 5.x, 6.x. Remember Wordstar 4? How about Lotus 123?

I taught myself to write programs using Turbo Pascal 4. The Turbo Pascal IDE was so easy to use (there's built-in debug/trace/watch) and compiles in a matter of seconds, making learning enjoyable. I concentrated on learning XBASE language, because I thought that was the future (it was until M$ embraced-extended-extinguished it).

I also learned some assembly commands by playing with the DEBUG command in DOS. CDh 20h was the command to terminate a *.COM program. The JMP assembly command is similar to the GOTO command in BASIC. I remember getting myself in trouble, because I messed up a hard drive after playing with the INT 13h command on a production machine.

Floppy?