What was your first computer and language ?

ArtLeeApps · July 2013

I just saw a post a post by @john26 mentioning a ZX Spectrum, it brought back memories.

What was your first computer and/or language ?

I was around 15 (45 now), around the1980's . i was the proud owner of a Spectravideo with a Z80 processor, used to spend hours writing assembly language just to get a ball to bounce around the screen. Push and pop from the stack.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectravideo

I had a dick smith wizard, with a cassette drive to load my basic games. With the keyboard that turned into joysticks :-)
http://ultimateconsoledatabase.com/others/dick_smith_wizzard.htm

Memories :-B

ar2rsawseen · July 2013

Then you should definitely check out this thread:
http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/820/-8-bit-nostalgia-

talis · July 2013

I was around 7 or 8 years(i don't remeber exact age) old and my brother was 12.
Those days there was no computers in Turkey or so less. I rememberd we had ATARI 2600

Anyway my father won a competition that Coca Cola company made and won a RadioShock computer. It is opening with BASIC directly. It came with a programming Book about BAsic and sample game programs for kids like guess the number, simple space invaders, XoX etc.. In the mornings when we woke we directly sittting infront of computer and start to write what we saw in the sample programs. Unfortunately there was no memory in the computer so everyday when we switch it off and pack it again all the codes that we wrote is deleted:D (My mother was thinking it as a toy so we need to pack it every day after we finished playing

)

10 CLS
20 PRINT "Oldies Goldies <img class="emoji" src="http://forum.giderosmobile.com/resources/emoji/smile.png" title=":)" alt=":)" height="20" />"
30 PRINT "I really missed old days"
31 PRINT "If you forget to leave blanks like this between rows,you will have a bad time later:)"
60 CLS
70 PRINT "Neverending loop starting for the memory of those beautifull days:D"
75 PRINT"."
80 Delay 1000
81 PRINT".."
82 Delay 1000
83 PRINT"..."
84 Delay 1000
85 PRINT"...."
86 Delay 1000
 90 GOTO 10

phongtt · July 2013

I first touched a PC at the age of 15 (year 1994). I was one of a very few number of lucky people in my town that knew about computer at that time (and actually it was also pretty new in my country - Vietnam)

It was my uncle's Intel 386
Started with a few basic commands of MS DOS, then felt in love with programming.
QBasic => Pascal => Foxpro => C => Assembly => C/C++

Yeah good old memories

gianmichele · July 2013

Oh dear...it's like admitting I'm really old

First experience was with the Vic 20 and basic, copying small games from magazines and trying to understand what all those poke and data commands were doing. I was 9...

ArtLeeApps · July 2013

@ar2rsawseen, thanks, lots of memories in that link ! And @SinisterSoft building the console style games we used to play!

@talis, i too recall typing entire games and trying to find the one character you made a mistake typing. Then powering off and loosing it.

@phongtt, some same languages ..in no chronological order...assembly,qbasic,cobol ,turbo pascal,visual basic,ansi c,c++,perl ,Unix,zenix,turbo c,progres,ingres ,paradox,vba ,javascript ,etc.... 8-X

@gianmichele, it looks like there are lots of old...i mean, experienced people here

Scouser · July 2013

@ArtLeeApps: I resemble resent that comment. Less of the experienced old if you don't mind

paul_k_clark · July 2013

My first computer was an Atari 400 with a whooping 16k of memory, a membrane keyboard and the unlimited storage of a cassette drive. The first language on that was 6502 assembly, although I had already done basic on the apple II and TRS-80 at school.

plamen · July 2013

I am just old :-) MOS Technologies 6502 needed really serious clock signal with very short pulse rise and fall times otherwise you will get sine wave all over the bus wires. $EA was the fastest op :-) Like it was yesterday...

hgvyas123 · July 2013

my first computer p4 with windows xp in 2004 and language c

zoolax · July 2013

I still remember I bought commodore 64,I were like 8 years old or something I were so excited I could not sleep the whole night, just staring at its brand new shiny box,man what a feeling.I played around with some language on it,I am not sure what is the name of it,maybe Assembly.then after that lua,then c#,I forgot Assembly pretty much,all I can play around at the moment is lua and c#.

techdojo · July 2013

I'm definitely in with the "oldies" on this forum. I started almost 32 years ago with a VIC-20 and Commodore Basic - peeking and poking and typing in listings (that almost always never worked properly) from C&VG.

On a side note - I watched a documentary about old toys a few yeas ago and they mentioned Meccano, and the company admitted they usually put deliberate errors in the kit instructions to help the kids try and solve some of the mechanical engineering problems themselves - I wonder if some of those type in listings had deliberate bugs to teach people to track down and dig deeper into the code (thus hopefully learning a bit more ???).

Scouser · July 2013

@techdojo: There were no bugs in the type in listings, only the ones put in by incompetent typists

)

I also remember one listing in a magazine which was actually the code from a commercial game that someone had just dumped out and sent into the magazine.

I just worked out that I've been at this lark for 34 years, originally writing in BASIC on a TRS-80 before progressing to Z80 when I got my own machine.

Mells · July 2013

@ar2rsawseen
I think we are out of this discussion

ar2rsawseen · July 2013

@Mells Yes basically in the same level as @hgvyas123
not a match for others pro

Mells · July 2013

@ar2rsawseen Well in fact my first own computer was a 486 DX2-66 and the first time I discovered a programming language (Basic?) was on an Amstrad 6128+.

The program was asking the user's age.
I made it for my mother and grand mother :

Basic 1.0
Ready
 
--pseudo code
dialog age="How old are you?"
if age<40 then
     print "you look beautiful"
else
     print "even so, you look beautiful"
end
-- With GOTOs if I remember well, but I was really young.

But then I started to draw instead of learning how to code, which is different from all the pros here.

OZApps · July 2013

@Mells Yes basically in the same level as @hgvyas123
not a match for others pro

Some of the newer developers were *perhaps* not born in that era to be part of the conversation

:P

Tried to stay away from talking about Z80 Assembly and Speccy games, etc - it was what shaped my interest towards computing.

SinisterSoft · July 2013

Basic for a few weeks until I realised it was too slow to do what I wanted, then assembly (6502, 68k, 65816, Mips, Arm, Hx (hitachi), x86, z80 also microcontrollers asm like avr and pic) until into the early 2000's. I now use PureBasic for stuff on OSX and Windows (it's also easy to dip into asm as and when I want and compiles very quickly), Gideros for handhelds (because of ease of testing). I remember I had to do Cobol (for an ICL 2904), Pascal and Modula2 (on a VAX-VMS and also on Pr1me's) at college, also wrote some stuff using Pr1me macro assmbler for the Pr1me mini's.

ar2rsawseen · July 2013

What are you guys doing with such abstracted, easy to use and flexible language like Lua?
Doesn't it torn you from the inside, that you can't torture yourself with some limitations of the language?

plamen · July 2013

@SinisterSoft woohooo, you have been walking the land of MIPS +1
@ar2rsawseen you have to see me cursing when i move back from Lua to VB.NET every time i need array. LUA tables are such blessing

SinisterSoft · July 2013

@plamen I love MIPS coding. Did a z80 emulator for the MIPS...

http://www.sinistersoft.com/public/emulators

ArtLeeApps · July 2013

What memories hey

on my spectravideo i cut a spare joystick plug, worked out by touching wires that it sent a code to the program (?basic )..1-8. for each direction. so i stapled tin foil pads to my door jam, and put a wire to each side.. same for my window... so when the contacts made a signal, my program would flash red with Alert on the screen... i was quite proud of that alarm system

john26 · July 2013

ZX Spectrum BASIC, I remember it well! I wrote a database program for the Spectrum which, come to think of it, might be the only database every written for it! Someone even paid me to write it and it had menus and everything! Although I agree Lua is more sophisticated in many ways, in other respects Spectrum BASIC had more facilities especially for drawing, writing on the screen. Modern languages tend to delegate these tasks to libraries but Speccy BASIC, along with other BASICs of the era had printing and drawing directly in the language, e.g.

10 PRINT AT 10,20; INK 1; PAPER 6; FLASH 1;"Hello, world"

would print the text in blue with a yellow background at position (10,20) on the screen (in term of a 32x24 text grid, with each letter 8x8 pixels) and also make the text flash. Try doing that in Lua or C without a library!

I remember being shocked when I learned Fortran and C, that you could only line print in a single colour!

The humble spectrum had a few things which Gideros lacks, eg with POINT(x,y) you could interogate the colour of a single pixel on screen. Don't think Gideros can do this..? ;-)

Of course there was stuff that looks crazy to us now such as PEEK and POKE allowing manipulation of individual bytes in memory.

Looking back on it, the Spectrum with it famous attribute system, was ideal for writing text based database, word processor and spreadsheet programs where all you need is coloured text in different places. It's ironic that the Spectrum was largely used as a games machine instead -- something it was ill-suited to, but what amazing things were achieved nonetheless!

In the days of the Spectrum, there was no question of downloading a library from the internet, the BASIC language had to do everything including graphics, writing files, printing (what's the equivalent of LPRINT in C?), making sounds -- though these were severely limited on the Spectrum. The division between language and library did not exist in those days. 8 bit BASICs "came with batteries"

In terms of the "language core", Spectrum BASIC was indeed limited. Only single-line if then statements were allowed, though you could string multiple commands (including more if's) using colons. There was no "else" statement or if blocks so inevitably lots of "if then goto" statements. The only support for subroutines was gosub...return. No variable scope, everything global.

The spectrum did have functions but these were single line only and really just for mathematical functions. E.g. DEF FN F(x)=2*x+1 then PRINT FN F(2.0). These were rarely used in practice.

On the other hand, FOR loops were very clear with proper nesting

FOR i=1 TO 10
  FOR j=1 TO 11 STEP 2
 :
  NEXT j
NEXT i

What could be clearer? Compare that to C's unreadable "for" loop (which is really a while loop).

There were some strange restrictions: some variables (either strings or arrays) could only have one letter names, restricting you to 26 in the program. Ordinary strings were variable length but I think arrays of strings were fixed length. (which is better than having no string support -- I'm looking at you C!)

Overall Spectrum BASIC was not a tiny language compared to Lua or C-- I would say they are equal size but with very different priorities. Practically, of course, Spectrum BASIC was far too slow to write games unfortunately.

techdojo · July 2013

@plamen I love MIPS coding. Did a z80 emulator for the MIPS...

http://www.sinistersoft.com/public/emulators

Me too - I did the Gameboy (DMG) and Gameboy Colour emulators that were used in a commercial PS2 product.

We then followed it up with a Gameboy Advanced emulator for the PS2/Gamecube as a competitor to Nintendo's hardware unit that plugged in under the Gamecube

Good times...

@Scouser - I think incompetent typists were on both sides, plus the printing on some of those mag's so so crap you could hardly read them anyway.

techdojo · July 2013

@john26 - we've moved on a long way, but also some great features have been left by the wayside. Index palette animation was another neat trick (just cycling the colours in the palettes) and was used massively in the 16bit era, with the move to full colour 16/24/32bit textures this is almost impossible to achieve now.

OZApps · July 2013

@john26,
yes, agree with you however the only difference was that the Speccy had the 16K ROM that had everything in it equivalent of a library. The flashing attributes is a favourite of mine too, however that was managed by speccy using interrupts. These were not used by me much but I recollect writing a small utility that overlaid some information on the first line like a HUD and the hooks were set by altering the Vector table and using IM2.

Because the BASIC was interpreted in debug mode, it was unusable at runtime for games but because assembly code could access the hardware directly, it made for some amazing fast games.

I never got a chance to develop commercially for the ZX Spectrum, however many of the developers that used it wrote their games in assembly, so the BASIC interpreter was disregarded by them.

On the other hand the C=64 users were lucky to have hardware sprites and SID sound and a complete alterable ROM, the entire 64K could be used as the ROM was dumped at restart into the upper portion of the 64K that the users could overwrite.

It was an amazing time, recollecting the days while writing this response was one fine trip into memory lane.

john26 · July 2013

@OZApps: it's a shame Speccy Basic couldn't run in "production mode". It was a nice language that was underused. I think another problem was the text grid was only 32 characters across which is not enough for a word processor, so this limited appeal for business programs written in BASIC.

I get nostalgic developing for the iPad as its resolution is exactly 4 times the Spectrum resolution in each direction (spectrum 256x192, original iPad 1024x768)! On the retina iPad is 8 times so you could play 64 Spectrum games simultaneously on a retina iPad!

Long live the 4:3 ratio!

Actually that's not a bad idea, get 64 playthroughs of popular Spectrum games and put them side by side on an iPad. Not interactive, just animation. I'd pay 99c for that and I'm sure you'd get your name in Retro Gamer! ;-)

john26 · July 2013

@techdojo, in the 80s the emphasis in programming languages was *doing stuff* (draw a circle, print on the line printer) now its far more on data structures and abstract concepts like OOP. I wouldn't want to go back to the days of spaghetti code with GOTOs everywhere but on the other hand there can be too much emphasis on "language theory". A program is not meant to be an exemplar of a recommended paradigm, it needs to do something!

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