On that scale, I clock in at 31 years :) First coded when my oldest sister was in 1st year uni, and I was in year 7. She had a computer account, and a 1st year "intro to Basic" manual - and I went in and played on her account until I got kicked out.
Though my memories of the first code are far vaguer than yours. My first tangible coding memory is the Ascii-to-Elvish program I wrote on my Dad's work's HP-85 in year 9. It was a mess of spaghetti code and hacks, but it worked - and I won a prize in the La Trobe Uni Computer Fayre for it! Ah, those were the days. I still have the original tape with the source code to that program somewhere... one day I'm going to find a computer museum, and see if it's still readable. - Korny (all nostalgic...) On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 9:14 AM, Duncan Bayne <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Boast? Usually, I see it as a mark of sad geekiness :) > > I'm up to 20 years in IT myself ... if you count writing a flat-file > database (in Locomotive BASIC on an Amstrad CPC 6128) for my primary > school at the age of 10 ;-). > > I still remember going home thinking "why the _hell_ isn't this > working?" It turned out to be the way Locomotive BASIC handled string > variables as arguments to system calls. This: > > OPEN filename$, 9 > PRINT #9, "Hello world!" > CLOSE #9 > > ... didn't work, but: > > OPEN "" + filename$, 9 > ... > > did (I'm pretty sure that isn't the _exact_ syntax, it's been 20 > years). I pondered that all the way home, and then tried it on my CPC > 464 that evening. I didn't figure it out, but I did stumble on the > correct behaviour by trial & error, & went in the next morning & fixed > the bug. > > > -- Kornelis Sietsma korny at my surname dot com kornys on twitter/fb/gtalk/gwave www.sietsma.com/korny "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of" --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
