6502.org

I must be one of the oldest curmudgeons on here.

My first programing experience was in 1972 in high school. I took a course called "Data Processing". We learned Dartmouth BASIC and had to write programs by marking cards with a pencil, hand them in and have them sent off to be batch processed at some other place. If we got our stack of cards in on Monday we'd get the results on Thursday - usually just a listing and an error report. It would take on average a month to get a program fully debugged and running. There were so many things that could go wrong aside from logic and syntax errors. If the markings were not dark enough, or went outside the little boxes, or you got a card out of order, or forgot to mark the continuation box when your line of code extended over more than one card, etc., etc...

It was a royal pain and it surprises me to this day that I managed to last through it and make a career in IT. A good deal of it programming.

(Me too: I took a Computer Studies course in secondary school, around 78 or 79, and I had my trusty 6B pencil for marking up cards. But I can't remember whether it was Fortran or Basic.)

Edit: thanks everyone, by the way, for sharing your stories!

My dad got a PT Sol-20 in 1978. I mostly used it to play Lunar Lander. But, I did do a little basic programming on it. My first real programming experience was in 1983, when my school required all of it's students to own an Apple ii. My folks somehow scraped together enough money to get an Apple iie. I programmed it in basic and eventually in forth (though, I remember exactly nothing about forth). Even though I owned the iie and later a c64, I didn't start programming 6502 assembly until a couple of weeks ago.

I probably programmed an HP calculator before I programmed anything else, but it's a bit vague at this point. I also don't remember if I first programmed in BASIC on a mini (core memory and all) or 6502 assembly on an AIM-65. That would have been near the end of the seventies in any case.