Reply to: Your first computer program

[MrNice]

My first computer program was written in PASCAL language and it would ask a user to type in two numbers and then the program would output the sum

[Doggy Styles]

Inspired by this thread, today I went to see Collosus. Magnificent.

Was Tommy Flowers one of yours zeity?

[doodab]

Something in COBOL on a DHSS training course in 1986

Hmm that's a good idea. Why doesn't the Job Centre just set up some outsourced call centres, stick the jobless in that and call it IT training. Then they can sit their with their baps out all day logging service requests for civil servants who's computers are running slow. That kills at least three birds with one stone.

[Sausage Surprise]

Something in COBOL on a DHSS training course in 1986

[NotAllThere]

watch outs for Parrots.

Is that because there's a danger of parroty errors?

[zeitghost]

My first digital computer program was written in FORTRAN IV on an ASR33 which punched the paper tape.

I discovered that " is different from ''.

Once you'd punched & corrected the paper tape, you loaded the compiler into the MOD ONE computer** via paper tape.

Then the compiler ran & used your program as input & produced an object paper tape.

Then you loaded the linker* & linked the object paper tape to produce your executable paper tape.

Then you loaded the executable & the MOD ONE computer crashed in flames.

It was ever so much fun.




*I'm not sure that it needed a link phase, but I've included it for completeness.

**The MOD ONE computer had 4k of core store & a VDU. The VDU was a sort of scope thing with a bistable screen that could show graphs & such like. It didn't do text.

MOD ONE is mentioned here:

http://www.tnmoc.org/news/notes-muse...omputer-weekly

Here's sommat about the CTL Modular One computer:

10Mb pdf.

http://www.redhawksys.com/index_file...20Computer.pdf

Complete with mouse nest in the psu.

[amcdonald]

Late 70's I wrote my first program on the schools 32k 2001-N Commodore Pet, to automate some of the tedious bit of gming Dungeons and Dragons

Ahh the days of Hunt The Wumpus!

[petergriffin]

Space invaders in assembler on the Oric-1. Not written by me, but I have adapted it from the C64, which used the same processor, 6502. I then quit programming as I though the IT wouldn't last long, me poor Doof!

[vetran]

me I think this reminds me of a poster but won't tell

http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__.../85/Kaiser.jpg

[darmstadt]

Todays programme:

>+++++++++[<++++++++>-]<.>+++++++[<++++>-]<+.+++++++..+++.>>>++++++++[<++++>-]
<.>>>++++++++++[<+++++++++>-]<---.<<<<.+++.------.--------.>>+.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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.