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Poll: How long have you been programming?

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131–140 of 329 posts

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#132
Started with computers 32 years ago at a school computer club where my physics teacher brought his own home computer in and taught a few of us to program in BASIC during a few lunch hours.

Earning my living with computers for about 22 years now.

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#135
post #85

After graduating from electrical engineering, I figured out that if I wanted to go into electronics, I would need to spend a lot of money on equipment just so I could practice at home, but I was broke. However, my computer at the time was pretty top notch (486DX 50MHz, 16 MB RAM). I felt that my computer was probably the same caliber as the ones that real programmers were using, so it made more sense to learn how to…

I find it pretty funny that _after_ you graduated (and according to the hardware you had at the time) you decided to completely change careers :)

I did pretty much the same thing, graduated with a masters in mechanical engineering. Taught myself to code and switched careers. Lots of cross over skill. (and engineering is very boring...) :-)

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#136
I started with Integer BASIC on an Apple II the summer of 1978. I went on to Applesoft BASIC, and then Apple Pascal.

When I went to Texas A&M in 1981, I started in Electrical Engineering, and took courses in FORTRAN and IBM 360/370 Assembly. I enjoyed those so much that I changed my major to Computer Science. We used PL/I for data structures class, and in the Programming Languages Survey we focused on Ada and Prolog, with brief mentions of other languages. I did a little bit of work for an Engineering professor in Turbo Pascal.

For my senior project, I got to use the CS department's new VAX 11/750 running BSD Unix. For my project I taught myself C so that I could assist a grad student on his "syntax-directed text editor" project. I've been in love with Unix and C ever since then, but didn't get to use it at work for several years.

My first real job out of college started June 1985, and it was programming interactive training systems running in a proprietary courseware design system on Sony CP/M Z-80 computers and Laser Videodisc players. The courseware system was buggy, so I talked my group into using C instead, which allowed us to be more responsive, have less crashes, and put more content on a floppy disk. The Z-80 C compiler was produced by BSD Software, which stood for "Brain-Damaged Software". It was so named because they didn't support floating point math, but that was ok because we could get by with various tricks and get done what we needed to do.

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#137
post #125

GW-BASIC, on an old Canon 8086. I'd be horrified if I still had any of that code around.

I think back to the GW-BASIC editor with horror, but that was my tool of destruction for several months. (Epson 8086 here.) Wait, I can only edit one line at a time? And I can't see the other lines while I'm editing this one? ???

I can't begin to imagine working on larger programs using it. Discovering Q-BASIC and especially Pascal (and Borland's editor) was the transition between crafting my programs on paper to punch into the computer and crafting them on the computer.

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#139
post #121

I've been using C for longer than my current manager has been alive :-)

Now that's funny. (and maybe scary? :-)

I learned C (from the first edition of K&R) about 24 years ago. And had no one to help me, so I had to understand everything myself and debug my own rampant pointer issues. Eeek! That was a wild ride!

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#140

Nearly 17 years and still going on... Remember starting with a neat little FORTRAN Hack all the way back in college. The instructor nearly fell off his chair when saw the source code - one of my favorite moments.

That seems great fun. Could you elaborate on it? Or maybe it's too long ago..
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