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High school in the 80s, I wanted to get the $50 Timex Sinclair self-assembly kit. After a back-and-forth with my parents, finally convinced them to get an Atari
by karmakaze 3y ago
High school in the 80s, I wanted to get the $50 Timex Sinclair self-assembly kit. After a back-and-forth with my parents, finally convinced them to get an Atari 400, though they really hated the membrane keyboard making it seem like a toy than a serious machine.
That was the best thing I ever got. All I had was the BASIC cartridge, Asteroids cartridge, and the intro to basic that came with it. I had no storage--that was the compromise for the step upgrade. It was a great lesson to spend literal days writing, refining, and perfecting a program. Only to eventually get bored "I wanna play Asteroids, poof." Eventually I hung around the right places, met folks, read magazines, learned machine-then-assembly language. Everything since then has been pretty easy building on all the low-level stuff. C, oh like assembly but more convenient. It was also fun to disassemble the games I got to see how they worked. Some of the worst games had the best copy protection--they must have thought highly of their creation.
Every computer since then has pretty much been a 'business machine', not nearly as much fun. Even the Atari ST with its M68k seemed very work-like. Lucky for me, I liked worky things too, learning the early Windows, OS/2, NT SDKs etc. The NeXTSTEP OS and Interface Builder blew my mind.
- abrookewood 3y agoSuch a good tale. I can relate to typing out programs from magazines borrowed from the library - but at least I had storage!
- screwturner68 3y agoI have pretty much the same story, started with a Vic20 (without storage), got the 4K expansion cartridge when my programs stated to exceed the builtin 3.5k, moved on to the Apple 2 and the Commodore 64 and then on to PCs. Mostly learning in basic and then I was doing a lot of dBase in the mid to late 80's, learned C & Fortran in HS and then I learned C, Fortran, PAscal and Assembler in college. The on to VB, C++ and then I pretty much stopped programming for profit in 1999 and moved into operations. In about 2015 I started coding in Python, life is so different when you have Google, stackoverflow and a module that does pretty much anything you want -why didn't this stuff exist why back when.
- karmakaze 3y agoOh yeah, I forgot about that one! I got paid as a kid doing dBase II on Xerox CP/M then III/IV on Olivetti PC too. Before I saw NeXTSTEP, Visual Basic 1.0 was amazing. I was lucky enough to get paid to make a similar GUI builder for OS/2 and NT. Coding for work was pretty straight forward, except for the occasional multithreaded work. It wasn't until seeing completely different languages like SmallTalk, Lisp, or OCaml that it got exciting again. Perl for me was just, why? I briefly saw Python used by some ops folks on QNX but I didn't venture into the whitespace is significant territory to see its goodness until much much later.