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I wrote my first program in 1973 but didn't get paid until 1981 for the first time. Still writing code (iOS) today. You don't meet many folks programming for th

I wrote my first program in 1973 but didn't get paid until 1981 for the first time. Still writing code (iOS) today. You don't meet many folks programming for that long today because there were only a few % at most of the number of programmers today. Many dropped out during that time as well.

japhyr 9y ago
Do you remember your first program in '73? What was your first paid work in '81?
- coldcode 9y ago
  I wrote something in Basic in 73 on a teletype terminal but no longer remember what it was. 81 was working for a defense contractor on a source code formatter. In Fortran no less.
pdfernhout 9y ago
Ah, the early days of the microcomputer revolution -- filled with so much hope and dreams for robotic assistants, simulation games, and computer-aided learning -- not the scarcity-preoccupied nightmarish surveillance state linked to killer drones that we've unfortunately and ironically ended up building alongside some of the dreams using an abundance of computing power. I can't claim anywhere near that length of service as many people here or in the article, but my start is close to yours. My dad bought me a KIM-1 with 1K of RAM around December 1978 when I was a teenager -- and we built the power supply for it together. I wanted to build a robot -- inspired by the B9 robot from Lost in Space and the Huey, Dewey, and Louie drones from Silent Running. Before the KIM-1, I had built my own electronic circuits with parts from Radio Shack like NAND gates, NOR Gates, and Flip Flops -- which was (in a way) a form of programming. And I was wiring simpler circuits before that from Radio Shack 100-in-1 kit -- and also before that on my own even as a young boy with wires, switches, lights, and batteries (sometimes things my father brought home for me discarded from work). Playing with digital electronics was a good basis for doing machine language programming on the KIM-1. I was first paid to do programming around 1980 or so by a high school teacher (Jack Woelfel) who also had a computer business selling Commodore equipment and software (American Peripherals). It was to write an editor for educational software for the Commodore PET -- which I named PeTeach for "PET" + "Teach". Reusing a letter in the middle of a word was a popular fad then -- even though it is confusing and in retrospect a bad choice of name. Forty years later, I can still keep hoping that we can still get more of the dream of Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" or the Australia Project (from Marshall Brain's Manna, the last chapter) than the nightmare of "Slaughterbots" (the video) or Terrafoam (from Manna, the earlier part of the story). And us grey-bearded and/or grey-haired programmers can still keep trying to make a difference by creating and supporting the better aspects of computing (including the basics like simplicity and directness) -- informed by notions of broad social benefit and not extreme concentration of power and wealth. The late John Perry Barlow was a good example in that direction. The late Douglas Engelbart was another. Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, and Chuck Moore are also good examples. But as Manuel De Landa says though, the world is made of a mix of meshworks and hierarchies that keep turning into each other -- so there are no easy answers. http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon is an inspirational story of what might yet be possible from a healthy mix of meshworks and hierarchies: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08

japhyr 9y ago

Do you remember your first program in '73? What was your first paid work in '81?

coldcode 9y ago
I wrote something in Basic in 73 on a teletype terminal but no longer remember what it was. 81 was working for a defense contractor on a source code formatter. In Fortran no less.

pdfernhout 9y ago

Ah, the early days of the microcomputer revolution -- filled with so much hope and dreams for robotic assistants, simulation games, and computer-aided learning -- not the scarcity-preoccupied nightmarish surveillance state linked to killer drones that we've unfortunately and ironically ended up building alongside some of the dreams using an abundance of computing power. I can't claim anywhere near that length of service as many people here or in the article, but my start is close to yours. My dad bought me a KIM-1 with 1K of RAM around December 1978 when I was a teenager -- and we built the power supply for it together. I wanted to build a robot -- inspired by the B9 robot from Lost in Space and the Huey, Dewey, and Louie drones from Silent Running. Before the KIM-1, I had built my own electronic circuits with parts from Radio Shack like NAND gates, NOR Gates, and Flip Flops -- which was (in a way) a form of programming. And I was wiring simpler circuits before that from Radio Shack 100-in-1 kit -- and also before that on my own even as a young boy with wires, switches, lights, and batteries (sometimes things my father brought home for me discarded from work). Playing with digital electronics was a good basis for doing machine language programming on the KIM-1. I was first paid to do programming around 1980 or so by a high school teacher (Jack Woelfel) who also had a computer business selling Commodore equipment and software (American Peripherals). It was to write an editor for educational software for the Commodore PET -- which I named PeTeach for "PET" + "Teach". Reusing a letter in the middle of a word was a popular fad then -- even though it is confusing and in retrospect a bad choice of name. Forty years later, I can still keep hoping that we can still get more of the dream of Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" or the Australia Project (from Marshall Brain's Manna, the last chapter) than the nightmare of "Slaughterbots" (the video) or Terrafoam (from Manna, the earlier part of the story). And us grey-bearded and/or grey-haired programmers can still keep trying to make a difference by creating and supporting the better aspects of computing (including the basics like simplicity and directness) -- informed by notions of broad social benefit and not extreme concentration of power and wealth. The late John Perry Barlow was a good example in that direction. The late Douglas Engelbart was another. Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, and Chuck Moore are also good examples. But as Manuel De Landa says though, the world is made of a mix of meshworks and hierarchies that keep turning into each other -- so there are no easy answers. http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon is an inspirational story of what might yet be possible from a healthy mix of meshworks and hierarchies: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08