How old are Real Programmers
- Thread starter BillDowns
- Start date
I can't resist - its from Alvin, right?
Age 55 (56 in Sept)
First programming (in 1980's): COCO Basic, extended Basic(even had Edit comand in the extended version). Mostly what I could pick up on my own so it was spaghetti code - never heard of structured coding until I went to college.
My first COCO had a whopping 16k of ram, so I paid Radio Shack $150 to upgrade it to 32k. At that time, they were using "half-bad" 64k chips for 32k machines with your machine set to which ever half of the chip slot was good so I paid Frank Hogg Labs another $50 or $60 for a set of "all-good" chips and added a hardware mod to be able to access the full 64k. Then I found out I could only program the second 32k in machine language anyway.
COCO's version of basic had each position on the screen numbered so you could use the "print@xxx" command to start writing whereever you wanted to on the screen. I learned the hard way that writing something to the middle of a line did not work too well if you later wrote something at the beginning of the same line. The first item would flash on the screen then disapear. That program was a character gen program for "Twilight 2000". It worked fine after I changed the line numbers.
Tried Comodore 64, but it was murder so I quit programming for a while, then I got a COCO3 with 128K which I was able to upgrade to a whole 1/2 meg of ram. Along with the upgrade kit I also got a "Big Basic" program that switched blocks of 32k or 64k in and out so I could program the whole 512k once I learned how to program the switching routine.
In '89 at age 39 I went to college. There I took 1 session of basic where I met with the idea of flowcharts and learned to add some structure to my programs. Then I started Pascal, but dropped out due to lack of funds after the first quarter.
I moved into the Mac world in the early '90s and never got into any real programing except for spreadsheets that I needed for my job as a Subway manager. (I had the only Mac in the company so the windows spreadsheet the rest of the managers used didn't do me any good. I couldn't get it formatted in the form Subway would accept so I had to copy everything by hand, but at least it did all the calculations for me.)
I have moved back into the Wintel world and have been playing with ship design as an exercise to learn how to program Excel the past year or two. I just upgraded to a P4 with XP Pro and am trying to learn VB and Turbo Pascal because I have aquired the programming environments for free.
One thing the old COCO extended basic had was the "rnd(x)" command where x was any whole number. It made die rolling easy; need a six sided die roll use "x=rnd(6)", need a 10 sided, use "rnd(10)" . Of course you had to seed the random function or you got the same set of numbers each time you ran the program. I set the afore mentioned character gen program in a loop with instructions to run until the generated character had stats within a given range. It ran during the night the first time and I copied the info (hadn't figured out how to print it off yet) and restarted the program when I went to work. When I got home I had an identical twin the the first one. I didn't have a counter for how many times the loop had run, but if I had, I bet that that would be the same too.
First programming (in 1980's): COCO Basic, extended Basic(even had Edit comand in the extended version). Mostly what I could pick up on my own so it was spaghetti code - never heard of structured coding until I went to college.
My first COCO had a whopping 16k of ram, so I paid Radio Shack $150 to upgrade it to 32k. At that time, they were using "half-bad" 64k chips for 32k machines with your machine set to which ever half of the chip slot was good so I paid Frank Hogg Labs another $50 or $60 for a set of "all-good" chips and added a hardware mod to be able to access the full 64k. Then I found out I could only program the second 32k in machine language anyway.
COCO's version of basic had each position on the screen numbered so you could use the "print@xxx" command to start writing whereever you wanted to on the screen. I learned the hard way that writing something to the middle of a line did not work too well if you later wrote something at the beginning of the same line. The first item would flash on the screen then disapear. That program was a character gen program for "Twilight 2000". It worked fine after I changed the line numbers.
Tried Comodore 64, but it was murder so I quit programming for a while, then I got a COCO3 with 128K which I was able to upgrade to a whole 1/2 meg of ram. Along with the upgrade kit I also got a "Big Basic" program that switched blocks of 32k or 64k in and out so I could program the whole 512k once I learned how to program the switching routine.
In '89 at age 39 I went to college. There I took 1 session of basic where I met with the idea of flowcharts and learned to add some structure to my programs. Then I started Pascal, but dropped out due to lack of funds after the first quarter.
I moved into the Mac world in the early '90s and never got into any real programing except for spreadsheets that I needed for my job as a Subway manager. (I had the only Mac in the company so the windows spreadsheet the rest of the managers used didn't do me any good. I couldn't get it formatted in the form Subway would accept so I had to copy everything by hand, but at least it did all the calculations for me.)
I have moved back into the Wintel world and have been playing with ship design as an exercise to learn how to program Excel the past year or two. I just upgraded to a P4 with XP Pro and am trying to learn VB and Turbo Pascal because I have aquired the programming environments for free.
One thing the old COCO extended basic had was the "rnd(x)" command where x was any whole number. It made die rolling easy; need a six sided die roll use "x=rnd(6)", need a 10 sided, use "rnd(10)" . Of course you had to seed the random function or you got the same set of numbers each time you ran the program. I set the afore mentioned character gen program in a loop with instructions to run until the generated character had stats within a given range. It ran during the night the first time and I copied the info (hadn't figured out how to print it off yet) and restarted the program when I went to work. When I got home I had an identical twin the the first one. I didn't have a counter for how many times the loop had run, but if I had, I bet that that would be the same too.
Andy: many programing languages now are integrating randint (random integer) routines as well as the "traditional" random fraction routine so common in late 1970's to early 1990's Basic and C implementations.
Most of the recent (post 1990) basics I've worked with, plus several C/C++ library sets, and Python all have this option
Most of the recent (post 1990) basics I've worked with, plus several C/C++ library sets, and Python all have this option