My first programming experience was on my Atari XE. It would run 2600 games, but if you didn't put a game in it would come up with BASIC. I didn't have the opti

My first programming experience was on my Atari XE. It would run 2600 games, but if you didn't put a game in it would come up with BASIC. I didn't have the optional floppy drive, nor did it have a hard drive of any kind, so when the computer shut off, my program was gone. I used to LIST and write the programs into a notebook and give hell to my mom when she would turn off the machine while I was at school (I was 9). Years later I got an old IBM PC JR with a Cartridge version of BASICA. That had a floppy drive (the 5.25 ones that were actually floppy) and I was able to save my programs. I wrote a few simple games. At this time, the Pentium had already come out, I had just been playing with older machine. My next machine was a Pentium 75 Mhz with 16 MB of ram (which I eventually upped to the max 128 MB). I got my hands on a floppy drive and brought all my code over and opened it up with quickbasic. Unfortunately I had been relying on the CPU timing and all my programs were way too fast (e.g. the pong paddle would move instantly to the other side of the screen). And it wasn't until about a month in that I had realized (being self-taught, sometimes you miss things) that the line numbers were optional. I could create functions! The rest was history.