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I would play the Buck Rogers game and then load up SmartBASIC from tape and try to code anything. At the age of 9 just getting something on the screen and knowing that I caused it to be placed there was epic!
Then of course after a year or eighteen months I left the tape in when turning on the computer and it erased everything on the tape. So I had to revert back to playing Gargamels Castle, Ladybug, Zipper and Zaxxon - wow, life was awesome then.
[ADAM Computer Review]
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On my parent's Epson Equity 1+ with gwbasic. 
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ZX81, Commodore etc - nope. My first Computer was a Microprofessor[^]. Had no such fancy things like a screen or a proper keyboard. Hacking hex-codes was the way how to program this thing. My 'Assembler' was a piece of paper and a pencil. But this is how I learned the basics of programming. H210018 for those who remember...
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I started at age 16 in 1966 and learned assembly for an IBM 1620. Have never looked back since!
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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Abacus and Beads eh?
BAck when programming was done with a soldering iron.
These young kids today have it on a plate, they didn't grow up through the technology.
------------------------------------
I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave
CCC League Table Link
CCC Link[ ^]
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Hi there,
I wanting some help around a problem i'm having with a powershell move script.
I have a pair of files (i.e. xml/pdf) with the same name. I only want to move/copy both to a new location only when both files are present in the pickup directory. The reason for wanting to only copy/move when both files are present are because of the system requirements in which these files are loaded into must be in pairs.
I have been able to achieve the copy/move based on doing a Get-ChildItem and using the -include switch to add the xml/pdf file extensions, but it's not exactly the right solution.
Please help?
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So, I assume this response means you still haven't started programming?
You might want to ask in the Q&A or programming forums.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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No. Wrong forum, technically not even a forum. Are you sure you are in the right profession ?
Prepare to put mustard on those words, for you will soon be consuming them along with this slice of humble pie, that comes direct from the oven of shame, set at gas mark 'egg on your face'.
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Bacon. Always use bacon.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction.
My work here is done.
or "Drink. Get drunk. Fall over." - P O'H
OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre
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my mentor was Chuck Norris
----------------------------------------------------------
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
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I had the old PCjr with cartridge BASIC to cut my teeth on. I remember being so very impressed with being able to program music with "Play" commands.
At school, we had either Apple IIs (with the cassette tapes) or Radio Shack TRS-80s.
Who else remembers having to wait a half hour for Lemonade Stand to load?
================================
Christian Mattix
Force 5
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By my 8th anniversary (1985) I got my Timex 2048.
It was awesome and I loved the games but the last page of the manual and the nice little words on the keyboard started to intrigue me.
I'm Portuguese and here we didn't had access to much computer information, at least not for me at that time, so my only resource was that last page of the manual and a family friend that gave me some pieces of code copied from somewhere.
Anyway, it was awesome.
Between playing Bombjack, RickDangerous, Chuckie Egg, Target Renegade, ... I wrote several games for my own joy!
I can't get enough of the word AWESOME here
After that Timex I had a Sinclair 128kb +3 (the one with some nice floppy disks that hadn't much use), a Commodore Amiga, and then the PC's and consoles took over.
Despite the incomparable quality improvement of the tech we have available today I can't get close to the awesomeness I felt those days.
Playing the cutting edge GT5 or GoW on PS3 can't please me anywhere close the way Bombjack did 25 years ago.
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Programmed game where you enter direction and elevation of gun, program returned distance to target or success. Target then advanced on gun emplacement and the process began again. If the target overran gun placement you lost.
All this is 49 steps. Learnt all about program size optamizations!
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ZX81 for me 
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...was when I got to Uni to study Maths and Computer Science. It was an ICL 1900 with George III as the OS, and the closest you physically got to the computer was about 100 feet.
All input was by punched cards, All output by fanfold paper.
Punching was a nightmare: six punch stations for around 500 students. Normally, one of these would have a working printer to print the card content on it: all the others just made the holes. Frequently, cards would jam, and it could take 24 hours for a station to be repaired. You got good at hand punching them, and reading cards just from the holes. In theory, you could hand write your software on coding sheets and they would be punched by "The Girls", but since this added another layer of error and took several days we very rarely did this.
To make life more awkward, the operators frequently dropped card decks and shoved them through however they were when they were picked up. So if you suddenly found a batch of FORTRAN in the middle of your COBOL program, tough.
There was also a run count, which was passed to the lecturers and used as part of the grading system for submitted work. Low run count == higher grade.
It's a miracle I managed to learn anything in the first year: until my industrial placement, when I went to Rutherford Labs and could actually type into a VDT and physically had access to the computer room.
Bearing in mind that an ICL 1900 is now eclipsed for processing power by my watch, you young 'uns don't know you is borned!
<rant>I died in two world wars for the likes of you! Bring back National Insurance, that's what I say! Couple of years in a Building Society, do you a world of good...</rant>
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together.
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I did Logo from 2-4th grade. This was followed with 4 years of basic then 2 years of pascal.
When I was in college they tought me Fortran.
Then when i did my masters I learnt a bunch of things from C, C++, Java and so on...
I miss coding in Basic
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gaurav_verma_mca wrote: I miss coding in Basic
So? You can download an old compiler and have at it.
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Yes I can but dose the guy who makes snowcones make snow man in his free time
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Compiled Basic? Luxury!
A BBC Basic interpreter is all anyone needs. 
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I haven't seen a BASIC interpreter for many years.
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In our Math/Informatics class, we also used Logo (but at that time, I already spoke C++). It was quite funny, actually. Especially since our teacher was a total douchebag.
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Logo is much better it uses FP
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... I started messing around with a trash 80 color my parents got as a gift I was 7 or 8. It's "OS" was the same Tandy Basic it was programmed with, blurring the line between the two heavily; and if the included manuals made a strict split between the parts that a normal user was supposed to read, and what only hard core geeks were supposed to care about, I didn't pick up on it at the time. At the time I never really went beyond for loops to create psuedo ascii art using block characters. I know I didn't grasp most of the advanced material; eg I remember after reading stuff like "Returns 0 if both parameters are 0, 1 otherwise" wondering WTH I could possibly use it for, or more generally WTH was boolean algebra in the first place. My initial forays with quick basic on the dos 6.0/486-25 computer bought around my 12th birthday never went much farther.
When I was 15 I registered for my HS's intro to programming class (turbo pascal). I went into the course with a massively swollen head, convinced that because I was "good with computers" and in the gifted program I should be able to coast to an easy A. It didn't help that the first few weeks of the class were almost as much of a joke as I was taking it as. Inevitably I crashed and burned.  It wasn't until about 6 or 7 weeks into the 9 week grading period that it really became apparent to me that I had gotten in over my head. Shortly after I realized I was in trouble my teacher/guidance councilor scheduled a meeting and because at that point it was too late to drop the course both recommended I just give up, take my F for the course, and use the remainder of the class as a study hall. If I really wanted (they didn't recommend it) I could register again next year and try again. Their opinion was that because each lesson built on the prior it would be impossible for me to recover because I couldn't understand the current lesson without the material I failed to learn previously. Both of them underestimated my stubbornness and missed that half the reason my written assignments scores were so bad was not that I was totally clueless (50 or 60% would be about right); but that my usual sloppyness was working against me when I didn't have compile errors to catch stupid errors. I managed to (if only just) get a passing grade for the quarter and finished out with A's by the end of the year. Towards the end of the year my teacher told me that in the 20ish years she'd been teaching the programming class that of the dozens of students who catastrophically screwed up at the start I was the only one who managed to recover and finish out with a passing grade. I never looked back from then. 
3x12=36
2x12=24
1x12=12
0x12=18
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