Your first programming experience?

[Simon27]

My first experience was 2002-3 with AppleScript in Mac OS 9.

I playing around with the Script Editor application. It had a record button if you hit that and then started opening windows, creating folders etc the screen filled with the AppleScript commands. My early teenage mind suddenly widened when I realised I could type these first and then run to make simple things work!

Later, under OS X, taught myself web programming with JavaScript and also Python scripting through the terminal.

Multiple times I’ve tried to learn native Mac programming with Objective-C and later iOS with Swift but that just seems to be one level beyond my mental capacity to learn the frameworks.

[barnacle]

Late seventies, on a Sinclair MK14 which I still have (proms have rotted, but I've located some new ones) and then a Microtan 65. Played with all the mainstream 8 bitters of the time - 6502, 6800, 05, 09, 8080, 85, 88, 86, z80 and so on. Used the Tangerine as a base for a lot of my own designs, usually synchronised to broadcast video signals; played with CP/M and MSDOS in various flavours, then Windows and eventually the sanity of Linux (I haven't had a Windows device in the house for years). AVR 8-bitters, and PIC, which I hated.

The last job but one was developing PIC-14 and z80 assembly code for deep drilling guidance systems; then C for ARM, and currently C for ARM again, making the best cat feeders in the world.

And building processors from discrete logic (currently debugging a sorta-8080) and Nixie clocks and ECU hacking...

Neil

[drogon]

barnacle wrote:

Late seventies, on a Sinclair MK14 which I still have (proms have rotted, but I've located some new ones)

Hm. the PROMS "rot" ? Best make sure mine is still OK then. Not powered it up for a while...

-Gordon

[BigDumbDinosaur]

barnacle wrote:

Late seventies, on a Sinclair MK14 which I still have (proms have rotted, but I've located some new ones)...

I've been banging on computers for nearly 50 years and have never encountered a "rotted" ROM or PROM. A ROM is mask-programmed during manufacturing and unless subject to improperly applied or damaging voltages, can be considered impermeable.

A real PROM's circuits undergo a physical change during programming that cannot be reversed. An OTP EPROM, e.g., Microchip's AT27C256R-45PU, theoretically could rot, but in practice that almost never occurs.

On the other hand, E(E)PROMS are susceptible to age-related rot. Furthermore, an EPROM can be erased by long-term exposure to a light source with UV radiation, e.g., fluorescent lighting. Jeff Laughton (Dr Jefyll) experienced an accidental erasure of an EPROM on which he left the window exposed.

[Dr Jefyll]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

Jeff Laughton (Dr Jefyll) experienced an accidental erasure of an EPROM on which he left the window exposed.

No, not quite. Light entering the window apparently produced a photoelectric effect which temporarily upset the device (an MC68HC705 EPROM-based microcontroller). But an ordinary EPROM would probably be susceptible, too.

Normal operation resumed once the window was covered. IOW, there was no erasure. But I had a valuable and humbling learning experience!

-- Jeff

[Dr Jefyll]

barnacle wrote:

And building processors from discrete logic (currently debugging a sorta-8080) and Nixie clocks and ECU hacking...

Neil

Discrete-logic processors -- cool! And in a way this relates to my own first programming experiences.

In the First micro or computing experiences thread I already posted about how I started on a KIM-1... which subsequently got modified almost beyond recognition! That contraption was pretty interesting to code for. (It has new opcodes for what I call "time bomb" memory banking.) But also early on my learning curve was a device I created before building this discrete-logic processor. Both operate, as does an MC14500, on data words which are one bit wide.

-- Jeff

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Dr Jefyll wrote:

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

Jeff Laughton (Dr Jefyll) experienced an accidental erasure of an EPROM on which he left the window exposed.

No, not quite. Light entering the window apparently produced a photoelectric effect which temporarily upset the device (an MC68HC705 EPROM-based microcontroller). But an ordinary EPROM would probably be susceptible, too.

Normal operation resumed once the window was covered. IOW, there was no erasure. But I had a valuable and humbling learning experience!

-- Jeff

I misunderstood. I though the device was partially erased.

[Alarm Siren]

Hmm. I feel really young reading this topic - my first programming experience was Visual Basic 6 on a Windows 98 machine. I was given that for my 8th birthday present, so it would have been in 1999.

Having said that, I didn't really get "good" at programming until my late teens at the earliest, and my interest in processor design, assembly and retro-computing only materialised around my early twenties...

[John West]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

barnacle wrote:

Late seventies, on a Sinclair MK14 which I still have (proms have rotted, but I've located some new ones)...

I've been banging on computers for nearly 50 years and have never encountered a "rotted" ROM or PROM. A ROM is mask-programmed during manufacturing and unless subject to improperly applied or damaging voltages, can be considered impermeable.

Normally, yes. But with Sinclair... I'd believe just about anything about Sinclair products.

Not unrelated, the PLA in the Commodore 64 is notoriously unreliable. I believe it's mask-programmed, but there was something off with the process which meant it would fail after some time.

Bil Herd, quoted in 'The C64 PLA Dissected' wrote:

By far the worst chip failure mode we had was the PLA around 1982-83 as it was suffering from poor passivation. It would get the ‘purple creeping crud’ which was corrosion under the protective layer.

[barnacle]

Rotten sinclair proms... well, they happened; I built a reader to find out what had happened to them, and some blocks were producing results significantly different from those in the listing (all 1 or all 0, mostly, from memory).

That said - I do rather suspect that my late father, in whose possession the MK14 was for many years, may have supplied power the wrong way around...

Neil

[dderny]

first experience around 1976 on the HP 25 calculator
then at the University Fortran IV on Univac 1110
discovered the microprocessors around 1979 and became addicted to the 6502 (mainly commodore machines)
then Unix and C

[kazzie]

My first taste of computer programming would have been in using Logo on BBC Micros and Archimedes machines. Not exactly sophisiticated stuff, but there waas an element of variables, subroutines, etc.

At secondary school we did a brief session with Logo for Windows. (This confused me a bit as I'd used a Welsh translation of Logo in primary school, but there was no such translation of the Windows version. I had to re-learn all the mnemonics, etc.) But by this time "Computing" had well and truly turned into "IT", so there was no more good stuff to come on the curriculum (other than Electronics later in school).

In my third year of high school, we had the good fortune of having a CS graduate employed as an admin for the newly rebuilt PC computer network. (They'd had an extensive Econet of Acorn machines, but ripped it out the summer before I went there. ) He ran a weekly computer programming club during lunch times, so as BigEd suggested, my first experience of serious programming was indeed Java!

At around the same time, I got my own second-hand PC to play around with, and set about things, the self-taught way. As well as spending my disposable income on hardware upgrades, I spent time playing about with DOS and Linux, trying my hand at batch / bash scripting, and a spot of Perl. At one time I played about with some 8086 assembly, by using a hex editor on a floppy disk's boot sector.

Later, at university, we did Java and C as introductions to object-oriented and imperative programming, and then some Matlab scripting and PIC assembly in subsequent years.

[cjs]

It was sometime in the 70s, when my father bought for me a computer of my very own. In many ways it was quite advanced for the time:

• The main RAM was 100 signed three-digit decimal memory locations, equivalant to around 11,000 bits, comparing favourably to the 256 8-bit locations (2048 bits) on many small systems of the time.
• Fully static: the clock could be run as slow as you liked without losing any data, and you could even put it away in a drawer and everything would be just as you left it when you took it out again.
• Very portable: weighed less than just the PCB of most other microcomputers and could run for hours without wall power.

Without further ado, I present to you the Cardiac:

Cardiac (open)

Of course, these days retrocomputing on simulators is more popular than using the actual hardware, so of course someone has built an online Cardiac emulator for your edification and entertainment. This is a pure software version; I don't know if anybody's ever done an FPGA version.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

cjs wrote:

Without further ado, I present to you the Cardiac:

I vaguely recall hearing about those around 1970, but never saw one.

[drogon]

cjs wrote:

It was sometime in the 70s, when my father bought for me a computer of my very own. In many ways it was quite advanced for the time:

• The main RAM was 100 signed three-digit decimal memory locations, equivalant to around 11,000 bits, comparing favourably to the 256 8-bit locations (2048 bits) on many small systems of the time.
• Fully static: the clock could be run as slow as you liked without losing any data, and you could even put it away in a drawer and everything would be just as you left it when you took it out again.
• Very portable: weighed less than just the PCB of most other microcomputers and could run for hours without wall power.

Without further ado, I present to you the Cardiac:

cardiac.jpg

Of course, these days retrocomputing on simulators is more popular than using the actual hardware, so of course someone has built an online Cardiac emulator for your edification and entertainment. This is a pure software version; I don't know if anybody's ever done an FPGA version.

that's pretty neat. Looks similar in ways to the "Little Man Computer"

Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_man_computer
My emulator: https://projects.drogon.net/lmc/

-Gordon