At 2011-06-11 10:21:50 +1000, [email protected] wrote: > > When I was 12 (13?) my math teacher got a local college to lend us an > ASR-33 teletype and a 100 baud modem connected to a customized HP-3000 > timesharing minicomputer.
When I was thirteen, I moved from Calcutta to Delhi (where my father had been transferred). I went with my father, before the rest of the family, to seek admission in various schools. That didn't take long. There were three things I could do with the rest of my time (all of which I did): walk around central Delhi, visit the British Council and American Centre Libraries, and go to my dad's office and play with the computer there. > After that the story is pretty much the same as above. Started writing > simple BASIC programs, played lunar lander and wanted to understand it > better so learned Newtownian mechanics, simple ballistics, > trigonometry. That computer ran DOS 3.3, and it had BASICA, but I didn't like it much. I could start BASICA and write programs, but I didn't know either how to save my programs or quit the interpreter. So I had to reboot to get back to the DOS prompt, and always lost my work. (One had to type BYE to quit rather than EXIT, QUIT, TERMINATE, or the other variants I tried). So I started programming in assembly using DEBUG.COM (aided by oblique references to doing so in a book at the BCL), wrote my own little macro assembler, and various other programs in the next few months. At the new school, I befriended the computer teacher, who was kind enough to let me use the lab (meant only for senior students). I learned Pascal, but did not like it, and preferred to write in assembly. Later, someone gave me Turbo C on 4 (6?) floppy disks, so I learned C too (but it took four or five years before I mostly stopped writing assembly. -- ams
