On Sep 14, 2006, at 7:35 PM, Daniel Stenning wrote:
Well You beat me in the antiquity stakes - my first stab at
computers was
much later - programming a "good 'ole" traffic light sim in
machine code
using a university dev kit based on intel 8008 microprocessor
( might have
beem 4004 - cant remember - it was 1980 after all...) using
switches for
each bit of the byte...
That puts me somewhere between Joe and Dan then as my first
programming was on a punch card system at the University's Computer
Science building in 1975.
I was in grade ... 10 or 11 then.
It was for a high school accounting course.
We had no tutorial, no language reference and no programming
experience but since I was already done everything else the teacher
said to try this computer stuff.
Tedious in todays terms but the best way to learn if u ask me..
I always remember feelng sorry for the computer science students:
while us
Electronic engineering lads got to program in basic,C and unix using
terminals and a PDP11, the comp sci boys were learning fortran by
punching
out paper cards and traipsing up 5 flights of stairs to feed them
into the
computer and then traipsing down to the ground florr for the
printout - only
to be followed by numerous more iterations of course. From what I
gathered
they hated their comp sci practicals while we generally enjoyed
ours...
Well I did - anyway
At the university I went to it was generally the other way round as
the engineering students wrote in fortran and we wrote assembler, C,
PL/1, and lots of other odd languages (APL being one of them)
Heck, we even had to write a compiler and simulator for a PDP-11 !
But I returned to University many years after graduating high school
so this was in 1986.
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