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Good old Radio Shack! Bought their assembly language cartridge and wrote a space invaders clone that you could control through voice input on the cassette port.
In high school they had Commodore Super Pet's with CPM operating system.
SPCA--we're here to inquire about the health of Dr. Schroedinger's cat<br />
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I started with the CoCo as well. My first had 16k and later on I moved up to 64k. I remember it was the coolest thing when I found out how to get those extra false color video modes enabled, but my happiest day was when I got actual floppy disk drives and could move off of cassette tapes.
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The play button on the cassette player was broken on my TRS-80. You had to sit there and hold down the play button. Got painful on long loading programs!
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Wow, they had color trash-80s?
I only got to work on a b&w version.
Nick
This are my own opinions. You know the rest.....
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The first time that I ran Qbasic, I thought it was a text editor, and surprise, it isn't, then I read for weeks the online help, and I learn by myself. I remember that alert "Syntaxis Error", I didn't know what does mean syntaxis .
----
hxxbin
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lool... nice story
Don't try it, just do it!
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sin tax is what U get when you do something bad.
I remember learning Pascal with an ancient Borland compiler version 2 or 3, which we learned to love. There was no mouse menus in those days, the other thing it gave us was a PC when it crashed your app. Latter we discovered that PC did not mean XT or AT, it actually was a program counter or IP, a kind of primitive debugger line number.
Conrad - conradb@adroit.co.za
Always do badly to start off, that way when you get the hang of it suddenly, everyone is surprised.
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We got an (old) PDP 11 in our lab at school and I was real programmer then: I managed to toggle in the boot loader with the front panel dip switches from memory (well almost...)
bb |~ bb
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Yes, I remember way back when I got my first computer...
It was an AMD 2600, that was way back in 2003, but it seems just like yesterday
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kewl
my father bought our first pc when i was 6.
(now i have my own machines)
Don't try it, just do it!
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Dude!! That was YESTERDAY!
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I started when I was 10 or 11 years old, with SuperLogo and Basic (a good old CBM 3032, still have it), but I used SuperLogo more ([b]much[/b] more).
I heard that C++ had more possibilities for me, cuz I began to find the limits of freedom of SuperLogo (speed and I/O) and they were disturbing me. So I started to learn C++, but I had no compiler. So I downloaded Digital Mars C++, but I wasn't very familiar with DOS-compilers. Small problem. Fixed just this year: I got VC++ 6 now.
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I learned HTML with 11 or 12 some days after I got my first computer (Pentium 120). But I am only 17 (nearly 18) years old, so thats not so far away. I do c++ only for 4 years ... and have no job
Goodbye and thanks for the fish!
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I started playing at about 7, with a cartridge atari, playing games with the joysticks and paddles, then begged for a 48k zx speccy rubber keyed. Think i spent the next 2/3 years typing in programs from the mags you could buy, and a mag called INPUT, that would show listings for various machines to program in. From then I collected various spectrums, ie. 128k +2, 128k +3, then baught an Electron and a commordore 64. Then I saw an advert for a Sam Coupe (sort of in between a spectrum and an Amiga), but the company 'Miles Gordon Technolodgy' when bust after about 2 years sadly, I think it was a great little machine with loads of potential, and it got me into writing assembler. Then I baught an Amiga500, then an Amiga500+ and an Atari500, stayed with them for a couple of years, and then baught my first PC, a Packard Bell 25Mhz 2Mb ram Executive PC! lol. Never looked back since. But I do enjoy playing with the emulators for the speccy now and again
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I would say that those of us who grew up alongside 8-bit computers were very fortunate to have the oportunity to learn so much stuff at the nuts&bolts level. (I am now an embedded systems programmer by trade using a 32-Bit TriCore DSP for most work, but playing with 8-bit micros when I was a kid in the 80's taught me things I still use every day).
To have a computer that booted in 1/2sec straight into a BASIC interpreter was very cool. To be able to take the lid off and have a chanse of understanding it is something you just don't get today. Compare our "toybox" to the computing world available to kids wanting to learn the important low-level stuff today - they're abstracted from the hardware, the processor and memory quite a long way.
For this reason I've kept all my old 8-bit computers (C16, Electron etc.) just incase my kids (if and when!) show some inclination towards computer programming.
Sam W.
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Once I got my C=128 I started doing some real, actual, honest-to-goodness programming in BASIC 7.0 (written by Microsoft! ). My biggest and most ambitious app was an equation grapher. (This was looooong before you could buy graphing calculators.)
I did some neat tricks like automagically figuring out the scaling of the axes so the graph would fit on the screen; and self-modifying code so you could enter "2*X^2-4X+1" at an INPUT prompt, and the program would insert that text into itself as a custom function. There were also the standard speed tricks like putting subroutines at the beginning of the program, so the BASIC interpreter would find them faster (when you did, say GOSUB 200, it did a brute-force search from line 1 looking for 200 )
Since this all ran in BASIC, it was slooooow, and C= BASIC limited variable names to two chars, so the code was unreadable (comments? yeah right) ... but still it was pretty neat.
I wrote up an article and submitted it to Compute's Gazette (a mag that covered C= computers) but they didn't accept it.
--Mike--
Ericahist | CP SearchBar v2.0.2 | Homepage | 1ClickPicGrabber | RightClick-Encrypt
You cannot stop me with paramecium alone!
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Yes, I had a little rotating 3D cube program published in a mag about Logo (remember the one with the turtle that could draw pictures). This would have been mid-late 80's.
Sam W
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I got published in a small newsletter, CUGOM (Commodore user group of Montreal).
We could exchange diskettes of stuff we worked on against demos and shareware.
I didn't know it at first, but I got selected for a "one liner" contest: the most fun program we
could write in basic that would fit on 1 line.
I won that contest! It was an animation of a pyramid using "keyboard graphics". It could only be typed in by using the "two letters" abbreviated basic keywords.
I remember that for the last two characters, I could not ":goto 0" "g" "shift o" "0" because that would overflow the maximum of 80 characters for a line in basic. I had to "r" "shift u" (for run) to enable the endless loop.
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i created a formula evaluator, too... but no graph function yet... QueueUserAPC ...
Don't try it, just do it!
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I had a BASIC article in an early MacTutor.
I had a couple Tech tips in Windows Developer's Journal (when it used to be called Tech Specialist - in its early days).
I had one on programming the parallel port directly from MS-DOS in an embedded programming journal (don't even remember the name of that magazine).
I tried for one on OWL (Object Windows Library) for Borland C++ in Tech Specialist, but the article was too long. Another reason to contribute to CodeProject - no article length limits!
Now I just hang out and lurk, occasionally commenting or submitting something to CodeProject. It is less financially rewarding to do so, but more psychologically rewarding.
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Michael Dunn wrote:
I wrote up an article and submitted it to Compute's Gazette (a mag that covered C= computers) but they didn't accept it
I submitted a couple of things to various publications, sadly none ever got used. I've still got the rejection letters somewhere.
Michael
But you know when the truth is told,
That you can get what you want or you can just get old,
Your're going to kick off before you even get halfway through.
When will you realise... Vienna waits for you? - "The Stranger," Billy Joel
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I was about 6-7 and my pops got it for my brother (who is 3 years older than me). But he used it a few times but it never got him.... it hit my stimulus HARD CORE! I would steal it all the time and screw around with it. Then came the Vic-20.. then it died.. then I Got another one and then.. I got an 8086 with a monochrome screen that was awesome.
Ahh ya... I was in grade 8 showing my classmates how I made graphics on the Vic-20. People were downright amazed by it..... geeks rule!
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By the time we got some C64's at school I could write a fun little space race game in about 1 minute and 3 or 4 lines of BASIC. Other kids were amazed, but the teacher was not happy!
Brad Williams
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HAHAHA ya I used to do those in BASIC on the Apple II. People were like "whoa he's like a rockstar".. and I'm like "no.. better!"
hahhahah
<geeks> rule!
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