Your first computer program

[aussielong]

I think I wrote a loop on a speccy 48k in 1986, printing out my name repeatedly. Then my dad complained it didn't "do" anything.

I then wrote a very basic game which was full stops falling from the top of the screen, which you had to catch in a bucket at the bottom (U character), you could move the bucket left n right. Catching increased your score and made a beep I think.

I also typed in huge chunks of code from magazines, which failed to run after hours of typing. I was about 11 or 12 then.

[EternalOptimist]

Every single thing I typed in failed to run. After dozens of magezines, dozens of letters to the ed or letters page
nothing worked.
Then I managed to get a line working in DB4


Then I got a contract. OK, I lied, I bull tulipted. but 3 months later I was an ace programmer


well, an @rse programmer. but kerching eh ?

[bless 'em all]

You designed and wrote it yourself at 5?

Piece of piss mate. ZX Speccy programmers do it in their nappies.




I still have an emulator on this very laptop.

[suityou01]

You designed and wrote it yourself at 5?

Yes. But to be fair it was based on a simliar listing so the main loop was the same idea, all I had to do was change the print statements to give me the shape of the clowns face.

I remember sitting on my Daddy's knee at around age 4 while he tapped in listings he printed out from work, on a ZX81.

While other kids where playing football and cricket in the park I was puzzling over listings from Input Magazine until age 12. Then I started playing football and cricket with the others. Oh and lots and lots of cycling.

I didn't touch another line of code again until I was 17, when I came home one night and my Dad was having kittens over a piece of Clipper code for a Data Dictionary app he was writing. I was pissed as a fart, pushed him out of the way and 5 minutes later found the bug that had been hounding him all evening. He was supremely peed off as I'd never seen Clipper before.

At this point I got the feeling a career in IT was probably ordained.

[MarillionFan]

Yes. But to be fair it was based on a simliar listing so the main loop was the same idea, all I had to do was change the print statements to give me the shape of the clowns face.

I remember sitting on my Daddy's knee at around age 4 while he tapped in listings he printed out from work, on a ZX81.

While other kids where playing football and cricket in the park I was puzzling over listings from Input Magazine until age 12. Then I started playing football and cricket with the others. Oh and lots and lots of cycling.

I didn't touch another line of code again until I was 17, when I came home one night and my Dad was havingr kittens over a piece of Clipper code for a Data Dictionary app he was writing. I was pissed as a fart, pushed him out of the way and 5 minutes later found the bug that had been hounding him all evening. He was supremely peed off as I'd never seen Clipper before.

At this point I got the feeling a career in IT was probably ordained.

This now all fits into place. You see your father as the Project Manager who is always wrong and who you have to fix 'Clipper' for. You crave his acceptance.

Tell me about your mother?

[NotAllThere]

10 PRINT "THIS IS A STRING"

from ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/si...tingManual.pdf

The first program I wrote myself was a moon-lander program on the ZX80.

[doodab]

To be fair, if you give a kid the best toy ever made, a manual, and all the time in the world to play with it, s/he's going to get good at it. The spectrum was that toy for a lot of people, and the manual was fantastic. Things also look different when you're little and there aren't a load of grumpy ****ers in authority telling you how hard something is before struggling to explain it because they don't understand it very well themselves.

I got mine when I was 7 (I'd already had a bit of time on other computers) and within 3 years (with a bit of help from magazine articles and a book my dad bought home from a training course that basically showed how to wire a different sort of microprocessor up to some RAM and peripherals and make it do stuff, but covered stuff like memory layout, addressing modes and the relationship between assembly language and numeric opcodes, binary representation of numbers, various ALU operations and so on) I had soldered in the ram upgrade and I could translate my own assembly language programs into poke & data statements. By the time I had finished my GCSEs I'd written my own soft FP code to accelerate the drawing of Mandlebrot & Julia sets & started teaching myself C from the library's copy of K&R (I was using an Atari ST by then). I had my own copy of Stroustrup, which I bought because I figured it covered C as well so I got two for the price of one. In hindsight, that was probably a mistake.

I've met literally dozens of people with similar stories over the years. We were a lucky generation in the right place at the right time.

Now I mostly program in a language designed for people who have no idea how a computer actually works. Go figure.

[doodab]

Let's hope that Suity isn't Leon.

I'm not saying there is a family resemblance, but I thought that was a picture of Suity before I checked the URL.

[suityou01]

This now all fits into place. You see your father as the Project Manager who is always wrong and who you have to fix 'Clipper' for. You crave his acceptance.

Tell me about your mother?

Ah yes, I'll tell you about one eyed Jack another time.

My father was never wrong. Up his own arse I think is a fair assessment. Patronising and self important. Then again he is probably one of the best data architects I ever met so there is some grounding in his pomposity.

So it all makes sense.

Where do you get your homosexual tendancies from? Why did you need to take the role of therapist on here? Would you say you were transferring your need of therapy onto others?

Did your Dad make you watch films about gladiators?

[xoggoth]

Think my first digital program (we used to have analogue computers you know) was Basic too. 1965 ?, handwritten, handed to university programmers to punch onto cards. What it did I can't recall, probably as crap as everything I've written since.