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My first computer was a hand-me-down C64 from my dad, and it's part of the reason that I started programming while I was so young. I never got good at programm

My first computer was a hand-me-down C64 from my dad, and it's part of the reason that I started programming while I was so young. I never got good at programming it, but I thought it was so cool that you start programming immediately after booting up. This would have been ~1998-1999, WELL past the the C64 hayday, but I had a lot of fun playing with it. I didn't really know how to use DOS on my parents' Windows computer, and so as far as I knew at the time, the only way to do programming there was to install a bunch of compilers and that scared me. Simpler times!

philjohn 5y ago
If only you'd known DOS shipped with Q-Basic! After we got a Cyrix 386 back in the 80's I moved on from Commodore Basic (on the C128) to that, then Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal and then Turbo C.
- tombert 5y ago
  Yep! Had I known about Q-Basic there's a very high likelihood I would have eaten that up, but this was really before I knew how to use the internet, and I wouldn't have even known what to look for on Lycos if I did know. I played with C64 Basic for a few years, until eventually I got the courage to download Visual Studio Express and learn a bit of C++ when I was 13, and hop over to Linux full time and use Emacs + GCC when I was 14/15, largely because the heavy reliance on the command line for Linux reminded me a bit of C64 basic. Occasionally I miss how integrated coding was with the operating system in the past. I think overall de-emphasizing coding is a good thing since I feel like the computer is useful enough to justify non-nerds having access to it, but there was something so cool about how accessible it was to, for example, make a game on the C64. If I want to make a game now, I basically have two options: A) Start from "scratch" and learn OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan/SDL and basically learn a masters-degree-level of information about graphics engineering, or B) Download something third-party like Unity or GameMaker [1] and work from there. I'm not going to say it's "worse" now, but it's definitely a steeper learning curve than just hoping into Basic and playing around with `poke`. [1] To be clear, both of those things are pretty cool, not knocking them.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Only starting with MS-DOS 5.0, until then it was GW-BASIC/BASICA. And the competition DR-DOS/PC-DOS lacked them (PC-DOS had the early versions though). I also made a similar Borland progression, although Turbo C 2.0 only took a couple of months and was quickly replaced by Turbo C++ 1.0 on the same year. After Turbo Pascal 6, dealing with C was a downgrade.

philjohn 5y ago

If only you'd known DOS shipped with Q-Basic! After we got a Cyrix 386 back in the 80's I moved on from Commodore Basic (on the C128) to that, then Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal and then Turbo C.

tombert 5y ago
Yep! Had I known about Q-Basic there's a very high likelihood I would have eaten that up, but this was really before I knew how to use the internet, and I wouldn't have even known what to look for on Lycos if I did know. I played with C64 Basic for a few years, until eventually I got the courage to download Visual Studio Express and learn a bit of C++ when I was 13, and hop over to Linux full time and use Emacs + GCC when I was 14/15, largely because the heavy reliance on the command line for Linux reminded me a bit of C64 basic. Occasionally I miss how integrated coding was with the operating system in the past. I think overall de-emphasizing coding is a good thing since I feel like the computer is useful enough to justify non-nerds having access to it, but there was something so cool about how accessible it was to, for example, make a game on the C64. If I want to make a game now, I basically have two options: A) Start from "scratch" and learn OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan/SDL and basically learn a masters-degree-level of information about graphics engineering, or B) Download something third-party like Unity or GameMaker [1] and work from there. I'm not going to say it's "worse" now, but it's definitely a steeper learning curve than just hoping into Basic and playing around with `poke`. [1] To be clear, both of those things are pretty cool, not knocking them.
pjmlp 5y ago
Only starting with MS-DOS 5.0, until then it was GW-BASIC/BASICA. And the competition DR-DOS/PC-DOS lacked them (PC-DOS had the early versions though). I also made a similar Borland progression, although Turbo C 2.0 only took a couple of months and was quickly replaced by Turbo C++ 1.0 on the same year. After Turbo Pascal 6, dealing with C was a downgrade.