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During the summer of 1971, between grades 9 and 10, I got access to the Board of Education's IBM mainframe and wrote some FORTRAN programs on punch cards.
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Keying in instructions on the front panel of a LEO/III (see below) in 1966, and then moving to creating self loading programs on paper tape. Worked on various different systems and languages in the intervening years.
Leo Computers Society. Leo 3 photos[^]. I worked on III/6 (i.e the sixth system off the factory), the first four photos on the second row.
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Depends. First program was written for the HP-67 on magnetic strip to run analysis of gas chromatography data.
Second was PDP-11 assembly to analyse data from Inductively Coupled Argon Plasma Spectrophotomer for elemental analysis
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, navigate a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects! - Lazarus Long
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1964. First year science at Monash Uni. Punch FORTRAN II cards on an IBM 026, submit to the CDC 3200.
The next year we did all sorts of devious things, based on fixed load locations and lack of array bounds checking.
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Early 1983. First year of engineering. FORTRAN on a Multics system. Judging from those first attempts I should not be doing it now. But I am!
That was the first year that they removed the punch card machines with terminals. Dodged that bullet!
I, for one, like Roman Numerals.
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Do those turtle things that run around the floor count?
If not, then I think 2000. Some Turbo C++ thing in which I wrote the biggest switch statement of my life... you enter an album track number, and it prints out the lyrics for that song. The album was Slipknot (self-entitled).
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1983, high school, PDP-11, RSTS-E, BASIC-Plus. VT100 and similar termini, no freaking punch cards.
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1974-5 (or thereabout) on the mainframe of the Weizmann Institute. Punched cards, batch processing, FORTRAN IV, 1-2 hours between submitting the card deck and receiving the output.
Need I say more?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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1984 I took my first programming class, BASIC. I absolutely hated it, the immediate spaghettification of any 'code' I wrote was very off putting, unreadable and near impossible to debug. I mostly blame the instructor for condoning poor coding practices. My next class was FORTRAN 77, and the opposite happened, I loved it. Since I was in the EE program, I didn't concentrate on programming in school. Only once I started working did I need to know assembler, c, c++.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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My first experience was with time-shared BASIC on an HP3000 in the mid-1970s. I remember the instructor being blown away that I made a cypher encoder/decoder program.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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What's with all the "pissing contests" of late? Everyone here has been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt. 
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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Well, for one thing, there's no wrong answer...
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Commodore 16, something like 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
Then bits of BBC Basic at School....
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Besides making a TI-994a say naughty things in an endless basic loop, my first real programming experience was on a pdp-11/23 running SCO unix, a cc compiler and the K&R book. That was in the late 70s if I recall. vi was the editor. Better than edlin though.
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TRS-80 Basic with the tape recorder in a gifted class, 1982.
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For me it was the Vic-20 around 1980/81.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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1983 (or possibly 1984), Spectrum 48K. Basic and assembly. What a wonderful chip the Z80 was.
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Gee - did you really learn programming through Algol? In 1968? I'd say that your are a lucky man!
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1971 university - IBM 360 Fortran IV on punch cards. I still remember the 026 and 029 card punches. Designing algorithms for the Universal Turing machine and using Facit machines to design number crunching programs. First time I got paid for a program was December 1971 as an assistant to a PhD candidate who needed some programs. Today, 48 years later, I am still earning my living writing programs. Gone through all the languages. Fortran, PL/1, Assembler, Cobol, Basic in numerous flavours, C, C#, php, CLipper with DBIV and probably a whole lot of others that I don't remeber. I am currently learning Python. It's been a wonderful journey and I wouldn't change it for anything.
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1968, in final year of high school, I did a Fortran IV course at University of NSW (over university radio). Submitted coding sheets by mail which were punched, run and the printout returned. So one batch turn-around per week!
1969 I started uni and graduated in Computer Science after 4 years.
Spent next 45 years programming.
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DEC PDP-4e, Fortran on a console typewriter and paper tapes -- memories 
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Fortran at school, cards sent to the Town Hall for processing but completely forgotten.
Then at the end of the 80s a ZX81 with Basic which swiftly proved to be so limiting so I moved rapidly on to z80, 6809, 6510, 68000 and 8080 assembler (actually with z80 and 6809 it was initially pure hand written machine code). 2 games published on the Dragon and Commodore 64 together with sound and speech hardware addons.
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must have been 1984
commodore 64 basic v2
38911 bytes free
the book was in German, useless to me.
first program:
10 PRINT "YOUR NAME";
20 GOTO 10
i wanted to do something colorful with graphics. i used to peek and poke it's memory and found out the screen map at address 1024-2023 and the color ram at address 55296-56295.
c64 had a terrible basic. as soon as possible i moved to machine language.
i don't know what was my first program, but i'll always remember my effort to move a sprite from left to right on the screen in assembly.
it took me about 10 careful rechecks and restarts of the program to realize that it is working correctly and that it is moving the sprite soooo fast that i am unable to see it. it only appeared at the final coordinate.
for comparison, in basic to increase the X coordinate of a sprite in a tight loop as fast as possible would crawl the sprite from left to right.
assembly language was the kind of revelation you see in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the monkey faces the monolith.
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1982 Apple BASIC on an Apple][ with 48k memory. Had a cassette tape recorder for storage and retrieval - no hard disk or floppies.
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Early 80's BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20
My parent's wouldn't buy a ZX-81 as it didn't have a proper keyboard, so I wouldn't be able to learn to type on it.
I still can't touch type to this day!
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