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Post by Ginnie on Jul 16, 2007 21:02:19 GMT -4
I was curious about this because it seems almost everyone who posts has some experience in computer programming.
My experience is very limited. In the early '80's I had a Timex-Sinclair Z-81. It had 4k of memory with a 16k add on. I used cassette tape drives for storage. I learned Basic and made games using asteriks, x's, and the like. My second computer was an Atari 128. I remember making a video of the cover of the Pink Floyd album 'Dark Side of the Moon' - animating it using joy stick directions and recording it along with the song 'Eclipse" from the album and putting it on videotape. Probably would look primitive today but at the time was pretty cool. My first PC was a 386sx 33 with 2mb of ram, 107 mb hd and half meg video card. It actually took me six months to decide whether to go Windows or stick to DOS. Multitasking and cut and paste made the decision for me.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Jul 16, 2007 21:16:11 GMT -4
A number of us have professional experience at it, and even still do it today.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Jul 16, 2007 23:28:06 GMT -4
I wrote very simple BASIC programs on my dad's Commodore 64 when I was six years old. I learned Turing, Turbo Pascal, and a bit of C in highschool, and some Visual Basic when I took some night school courses at Mohawk College, but since I've only had access to the limited student version of VB I couldn't compile the programs I wrote (not that they were ever worth compiling).
Now I mostly do web programming (HTML, Javascript, and PHP mostly).
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Post by wingerii on Jul 17, 2007 0:09:57 GMT -4
I fiddled around with BASIC in my spare time when I was younger, worked with VB and Java in high school, and now C# and C++ in university so far.
No professional experience unless you count Python scripting doing software QA during my first co-op work term (I definitely don't miss that at all).
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Post by Data Cable on Jul 17, 2007 0:46:11 GMT -4
Fiddled with line-numbered BASIC as a kid on Apple ][*s (in school) and Atari XL/XE models (at home). Didn't really do much else 'til I dove headfirst into UnrealScript a few years back, which taught me C-style syntax (from which I carry over common conventions to other similar languages). Then I got into C++.
[Edit: Oh yeah, my first computer was also a Timex Sinclair 1000 (which I believe is the American equivalent of the Z-81, ginnie) with the horrible membrane keyboard. Very basic BASIC on that one]
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furi
Mars
The Secret is to keep banging those rocks together.
Posts: 260
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Post by furi on Jul 17, 2007 5:24:50 GMT -4
Had access to Pets and Sharps when young, First home computer was a Vic20, programmed in Basic and Hex, stuck with Commodores with the 64 and Amiga, Schools had the Acorn Proton (BBC) and a few Lynx systems. at home mostly proggied the commodores. (Amiga For Teh Win ) Piddled about with Various Micro controllers and 6502 Hex and Assembler whilst working, C VB C++ as required but don't make a habit of using them Have worked (but not necessarily proggied) some nice Chunky Vax and Dec minis, (wasn't allowed in the Server room at Unilever Bah) but got a nice Big AS400 later on to admin (She was called Kate)
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Post by echnaton on Jul 17, 2007 10:04:25 GMT -4
I learned basic programing in high school using teletype terminals attached to a school district main frame by a 300 baud acoustic modem. Programs were stored on the computer but space was very limited so we used paper tape for backups. This method was a dinosaur even in 1977. I wrote some simple programs like black jack and some elementary business type applications. It was my favorite class in school.
I college I studied Fortran and Cobol. The computer was not quite the dinosaur of high school but was the old computer for the collage that had filtered down to the students. It was adequate for the simple classes at our small college, but writing Cobol programs on punch cards for a guy that couldn't type was a lesson in frustration. Later I operated that computer in the student lab. I had the honor of being the operator on duty when it met its demise. My job was canceled and both the computer and I got replaced by Apple PCs.
The only programing I do today is writing simple VBA macros and functions for Excel. Programing can be fun but I don't think I could have been good enough to do it professionally.
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Post by gwiz on Jul 17, 2007 16:12:30 GMT -4
As I stated on an earlier thread, most of my professional coding experience was with Fortran and C. I started my career with oddities like Pegasus Autocode, moved on to Algol (the daddy of Pascal) and settled on Fortran for most of my career. The switch to C was followed by my company getting so uptight about QA that it was generally easier to work something out on a spreadsheet that to code it up. By this stage, anyway, commercial codes for my type of work were coming on the market, and I haven't coded anything professionally for some eight years. Since then I've written a few Delphi (a sort of visual Pascal) programs for personal use, mainly because I got hold of a free compiler.
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Post by donnieb on Jul 17, 2007 18:56:36 GMT -4
By trade, I'm an embedded systems engineer. I've worked in professional audio and (most of my career and currently) on fire protection systems. Your life could, quite possibly, be in the hands of my hardware and firmware. (I hope the situation never arises, but it has on a few occasions -- and our systems have done their job. One sad exception: some of our equipment was destroyed in the Oklahoma City bombing. Needless to say, it didn't operate, but it wouldn't have done much good if it had.)
I wear a lot of hats, but the lion's share of my time is programming (design and coding, testing and debugging). I work almost entirely in C (plus a bit of assembly), but I use a lot of tools to help me write good structured code.
Most of my recent designs have employed embedded controllers with ARM 7 cores.
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Post by alex04 on Jul 17, 2007 22:40:08 GMT -4
most of the programming i did was prior to Windows being released - BASIC mainly, although i messed with Assembly and batch file programming. (C64 and PC)
I re-introduced myself to programming back in 2000, writing small programs in C, and more recently have messed around with Visual Basic.
I can't seem to get focused on increasing my programming knowledge unless there's a specific project that i want to do. Which i haven't gotten around to, yet unfortunately.
I would say that at this point, i'm still at beginner level (no formal training)
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Post by ShowCon on Jul 18, 2007 10:13:21 GMT -4
Played a lot with Apple BASIC in the 80s in high school. Nowadays I do some BASIC Stamp programming as a hobby and I do a good bit of show control systems programming (WonderWare Factory Suite, Medialon, getting into AMX).
Doug
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Post by nomuse on Jul 18, 2007 14:01:04 GMT -4
No programming for me. Scripted in BASIC on a number of platforms, got a little past my "Hello, world" in Z80 Assembly, and currently stuck on chapter 3 of "C++ for Dummies." Some of it has been work-related, but it was my choice to use a computer to do that work (only a nut-job would run a mirror ball via a stepper motor driven off a binary counter implemented in CP/M BASIC!)
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Post by grmcdorman on Jul 18, 2007 14:56:51 GMT -4
You probably saw my self-introduction on the "new members" thread in the hoax-subforum. My whole career has been programming, starting with APL as a summer job before I graduated high-school and proceeding from there. (In fact, when I took the assembly language course in university, I knew more about the assembler than the prof.)
Currently, I'm programming mostly in C and C++ (legacy code), but have worked with C# and Java recently.
ETA: My first "home" computer was the LSI-11 kits that the now-defunct Heathkit was selling. (In fact, I got the last one available In Canada.) (The LSI-11 was the bottom-end CPU for DEC's PDP-11 series. The PDP-11 was a 16-bit dual-address instruction set machine, and was the machine on which both Unix and C were first developed.)
My second home computer was an Amiga (A1200). There are now five computers at home: one for each member of the household, plus a fifth server (which doesn't even have a monitor).
ETA 2: I dislike the titles of the xxx for Dummies series. Most of us aren't dummies; we're just inexperienced. (When I wrote an intro document for a support library I created for a project, I called it The Utter Neophyte's Guide To....)
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Post by Bill Thompson on Jul 18, 2007 20:24:51 GMT -4
Computer? You mean this boxy thing on my desk?
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Post by Data Cable on Jul 19, 2007 0:49:50 GMT -4
You mean this boxy thing on my desk? No, more like his pet daggit.
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