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First Programming Language?

CommodoreZ

CommodoreZ

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So, going to elementary school in later 90s, I was taught LOGO using the Microworlds GUI on what I think were some of the later Macintosh Perfoma series machines. I really wish I could remember more about it.

I remember having a lot of fun making the little turtle draw across the screen starting in 2nd grade, and ending in 5th grade. I seem to remember being pretty good at it too, but that may be nostalgia or ego talking...

That got me thinking: did anybody else have an experience like this (not necessarily with Microworlds)? More broadly, did you learn a programming language in public schools, and if so, which one?
 
Heh, I was homeschooled myself. Started learning to program with MacBASIC (the good one, the one that Microsoft put the kibosh on and that subsequently made the rounds as samizdat) on our IIcx. Good times :)
 
CommodoreKid said:
So, going to elementary school in later 90s, I was taught LOGO using the Microworlds GUI on what I think were some of the later Macintosh Perfoma series machines.
Click to expand...

Since I went to primary school at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s (when President Kennedy was assassinated, I remember being in 4th grade), there were no computers in school for me...

My first experience with programming came in my freshman year of college, with Fortran, on punch cards, and jobs submitted in batch mode by computer operators behind the window, and pick up your printout later in your output box.

I had first hand experience with the "computer priesthood" that was railed against by the folks who started the personal computer revolution, oh so many years ago.

smp
 
Whatever the form of Basic that was on the PDP-10. Rutgers dumped excess inventory on the surrounding school systems and I was lucky enough to be in one. 3 teletypes with paper tape spread amongst an entire school did strongly encourage designing away from the keyboard.
 
I think there's another thread with this also.. but my first school programming was probably 7th grade on Apple II systems with basic. It was something I had always wanted to learn since our first computer entered the house so I'd take the assignments home and type them into our home computer in gw-basic and then be greeted by lots of underwhelming syntax errors and bad commands. On the bright side most computers came with a dos command reference AND basic language book so I'd sift through the basic book with examples and could figure out how to write other things myself eventually.
 
My programming is basically self-taught. The first language I learned was Univac assembler during NTDS training in the USN. The first language I ever used to write some code was Focal-8
 
Well I learnt both Machine Code and Fortran II in what in the UK we call 6th form, so 16-18....

We had a school-brew machine that had 16 memories (I think)

That was a serial machine so you toggled the data in a bit at a time using 0 and 1 push buttons. When we got a program to work on that we could write a Fortran II program on coding forms and post off to the local college.There they were run on an old IBM1620 that had been replaced by a new ICL 1900 and so was used for schools...
 
I learned BASIC on a Tandy TRS 80 at the local Mall watching over someone's shoulder in the late 70's when I was a kid. My mom used to take me to the mall and leave me at the Radio Shack while she shopped. Across from the RS was a coin shop. Kept me busy for hours bugging the clerks and asking questions. First program 10 PRINT "Bill is cool!!!!!" 20 go to 10. The first serious programming was done on my friends TI 99/4a a few years later. Lesson learned - spend three hours typing in a program is good, but first make sure you have a way to save!

I remember some sort of exposure to DEC terminals in my elementary school days, Dow Jones, and some kind of service provided by the U of Delaware. I remember all you had to do back then was dial in from the secretary's computer and you'd get access to a login prompt. I also remember learning about hypertext, and I used Plato in 2nd grade, all kinds of tiny computer exposure but only bits here and there. Shame, I would have gotten ahead so much faster if someone had given me a Sol-20 when I was a kid.

-b-
 
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Basic and then Pascal on a VAX in college. 1986? Still have the textbooks. :) I was one class shy of a minor in Computer Science, but they upgraded the OS one year and made the thing unusable for pretty much the whole year, so I blew that last elective on Idenification of Unknown Organic Compounds instead. Idiot.
 
Logo, around 4th or 5th grade, in public elementary school. I think the computer was a Vic20 or C64. All they taught us was turtle graphics. It was cool, but I had a lot more fun in middle school (started with 6th grade) learning AppleSoft BASIC on a II+.
 
The real thrill of programming in 1967- via the toggle switches on the front of the computer. Our first programming assignment was to manually enter the instructions and execute them to zero (clear) the whopping 8k of memory on a GE-225, which qualified me to hold the unique (and obsolete) title of "bit flipper".

Of course, the first programming language you learned after that was GE's GAP assembler language.
 
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My first programming was in BASIC on a Commodore 4032 PET. Our major assignment was the classic "shell game". You essentially generated a random number between 1 and 3 and allowed the player to guessed it. I had built it up with PetSCII graphics and everything. It was a "filler" course for me to finish my last year in high school. After that, I was hooked and went onto college to do programming.
 
Timex-Sinclair BASIC
Commodore/PET BASIC (VIC-20)
Microsoft BASIC (Tandy Model 3)

Pascal (Pascal MT+, Model 16b Lifeboat/Pickles & Trout CP/M and z80 assembly (PROLOG nemonics)
Pascal (Model 16b, Microsoft XENIX)

Trying not-quite-hard-enough to get into ARM assembly... would like to find a Pascal to use for it..
:D
 
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