First Program You Typed In

Me and my big brother sometimes cooperated in typing in listings full of DATA statements. I would read the numbers and he would type them, instead of reading himself from the magazine. It worked quite well.

The worst part about typing in a program from a book - especially when I was a newbie:

- telling the difference between a 0 and a O. It helped telling them apart when I learned how the commands worked

- PETSCII (although I've seen books where someone took enough care to put a box around the graphic)

- Spaces:
- Data statements: DATA 0, 0, 5, 5, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 1, 1, 9, 1, 9, 9, 1

- Bad printing during book manufacturing. Try telling the difference between C, D, O, 0, G Q

I remember typing in a program from the TI 99/4a manual. It took a long time to type it, did not work.

I'm pretty sure mine would have been

PRINT "Hello World!"

Click to expand...

The first exposure I had to any programming was in a course I took at Junior College while getting my AA in electronics. We had a KIM-1 we used for our lab experiments. That was about 25 years ago and the only thing I remember was that it was low level using the instruction set of the Motorola 6502. At that time there was only one person in the whole class that had a personal computer. He had an IBM PC Jr.

I have no idea what it would have been , I know it was before I started school, so I would have only been 4 years old at the oldest. Don't even know if it was on the Atari 400 (we never had a VCS/2600, why would we when he had the superior 400?), or on the Vic 20 - we had both at the time. Most likely it would have been on the Vic - the Atari was mainly used for games, although I do know I did do programming on both of them during that time period, the Vic was certainly more suited to typing in programs then the Atari 400 with it's horrible (although very kid proof) membrane keyboard.

I could ask my mum, but I doubt she'd remember which one I programmed FIRST, she does have pictures of my as a very small child sitting in front of the Vic programming it - and yes, that is what I was doing, you can see the some of the program listing on the screen in the picture.

Given that I was doing such things at such a young age, it was obvious I'd have a lifelong interest in computers, and that Atari and Commodore machines would interest me in particular.

I don't remember if it was my first, but it was a long time ago and most likely close to this one:

Prints HELLO WORLD on a line by itself and halts. Lower case and exclamation points weren't part of this machine's character set.

First program

First program

I suppose there are several firsts in different languages and those I enjoyed both in and out of school, as others have I might imagine.

1974 Homebrew 8bit microprocessor-MICROCODE-TTL design-programmed firmware
1975 School's Minicomputer-Honeywell 1646-BASIC-A number sequence pattern solver
1976 Hobby Computer-Altair 680-ASSEMBLY-Monitor using a homebrew ascii terminal
1977 School's Minicomputer-Honeywell 1646-FORTRAN-Knight's puzzle
1977 Home Computer-TRS80model I-BASIC-Death Star Game (my ol' buddy's computer)
1978 School's Minicomputer-Honeywell 1646-PL/I-Science Fair-Heuristic Language processor

=Dan

I did the same thing back in 1979! I'm glad I wasn't the only one.

First program I ever typed in BASIC? Well, besides the obvious "Hello World" bit, my first program I typed was on a TRS-80 Model III, a clock program. The program, straight from the "Getting Started with TRS-80 BASIC" book setup a clock to be displayed in the top right(?) corner of the screen at all times until the stop code was executed or the machine reset/turned off. It was a pretty cool program...Wish I knew one for GW-BASIC that would run in DOS after typing "system."

--Jack

Hi
I believe the first program I ever typed was a disassembler
I wrote for the BASIC on my Poly88.
Dwight

Yzzerdd wrote:

First program I ever typed in BASIC? Well, besides the obvious "Hello World" bit, my first program I typed was on a TRS-80 Model III, a clock program. The program, straight from the "Getting Started with TRS-80 BASIC" book setup a clock to be displayed in the top right(?) corner of the screen at all times until the stop code was executed or the machine reset/turned off. It was a pretty cool program...Wish I knew one for GW-BASIC that would run in DOS after typing "system."

What exactly are you after in terms of a Clock on an IBM compatable? If you're after a Delay routine then Interrupt 01Ah Function 0 is what you need for a Delay, unfortunately you'd have to write a M/C subroutine for that to work I suppose (don't think GWBASIC supports Inline Assembly!) because you have to PUSH all the registers, setup the timer tick then you have a delay value for what you wish to use check the time of day services, check to see if the delay has passed and jump if it hasn't, then POPing all the registers (I can post the Assembly code if you want, though I'm unsure if you can do that in GWBASIC! :-o I've used it in Turbo Pascal 3 though! :-D

My earliest, in a sense, programming entry experience, was in the mid-50s, as a "Junior Computer Operator" for a large government Workmens Compensation installation. After an obligatory time training on the IBM Sorter, I was allowed to wire up a pegboard for various machines like the Collator, Interpeter, and the "awesome" accounting machine and printer which issued cheques. My high point was having charge of the sole "Statistical Sorter(?)" for 2 months producing the previous year-end report of payouts, types of injuries or job-related diseases, etc. for publication by the agency. I still remember my shock at the number of people receiving compensation for respitory illnesses like "Black Lung" and others, even under the tough WC regulations, not to menton the number of industry accidents.

The agency itself was established by the government to avoid lawsuits by industry workers.
Nothing to do with any concern for the plight of the workers involved, or their family, of course.

Lawrence

hard to remember, but prob that ballon code for C64

Maybe not strictly the first one, but memorable for me, was on an Apple /// (Apple basic). All it did was set the clock to midnight and count to 999,999 by ones (in memory, not displayed on the screen). When done, it beeped a few times and displayed the current time. I think it took something like 23 hours to complete. Admittedly a long time ago and I'm guessing a bit here about the exact time frame.

I also remember typing in one from an Apple magazine. My first use of the numeric keypad. It was an airplane that you would move up and down with the arrow keys and try to dodge the clouds. No idea what is was called though.