1975 in BASIC on Dartmouth College's time sharing system. I was 13 at the time and the local schools had installed a handful of mechanical teletypes (chukka chukka chukka chukka ding chukka...). It was a beautiful thing!
Poll: When did you start programming?
31–40 of 70 posts
Re: Poll: When did you start programming?
#32[deleted]
Re: Poll: When did you start programming?
#33... the zx-81 and basic was my first weapon .. 1982 or 1983
Re: Poll: When did you start programming?
#34On a vic 20 that we hooked up to the living room's tv, we got it when I was 7 ad played games on it. Then I started programming when I was 8.
It had all sorts of characters like borders and symbols that made character (think ascii) graphics work not too bad. Peeking and poking memory was fun too.
Re: Poll: When did you start programming?
#35A poll on "how old were you when you started" would also be interesting.
Re: Poll: When did you start programming?
#36I was 14 when I began tinkering with the BASIC code of the DOS 'Gorillas' and 'Nibbles' games. I loved changing the color schemes and making the bananas fly ridiculously fast.
Re: Poll: When did you start programming?
#37Technically I was exposed to Logo as a kid, but we never kept the computer in our classroom for long. My first exposure to Visual Basic was in 1997 for one semester(freshman in high school), and started seriously programming in C++ in 1999(start of senior year). I do mostly .Net now.. I still feel like I have a long way to go. I never knew how to get developer tools and good documentation till my last year of school.…
I don't know how this came about, but my elementary school had (the gifted kids) programming in LOGO in 2nd and 3rd grades. It was never explained as computer programming, more like a game to make a turtle draw cool things.
I'd love to meet the school administrator who decided this was important and buy him or her a beer. It started my entire passion for computers and programming.
Re: Poll: When did you start programming?
#38Kindergarten, late '80s.
Kindergarten, seriously? I started at 7, and I though that was on the early side.
It's possible. Kindergarten is age 5-6.
I started with LOGO in the first grade( age 6 ), if that can be considered a programming language. I was poring over my dad's purple 8086 book by age 8 and writing some basic assembly programs.
Kids' minds are incredibly plastic. One year difference, given the wide variability of interest and abilities in a given population pool, kindergarten is not difficult to believe.
Re: Poll: When did you start programming?
#39My Dad got me a ahem pirated copy of visual basic 6 when I was about 14 in 00/01 While I'd hate to develop anything in VB these days, it did kick off my interest in software development. Especially when my friend was into it as well so we'd make stuff and share it with each other. Java developer by trade these days, and I use Ruby or Objective-C for personal development.
Not to pile on the guilt, but I swept yards when I was 11 to raise the money to buy Visual Basic for DOS 1.0 when it came out ;-) Unfortunately, the joke was entirely on me in the end!
Re: Poll: When did you start programming?
#40MacPascal on a 512k Mac with 20MB of hard disk, probably around 1985-86.
I didn't do anything useful with it, but that editor had the weirdest syntax highlighting ever - a mix of bold/italic/outline for symbols/variables/errors.