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I've used clipper when I did my military service.
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I've been work in FiveWin (Clipper For Windows) and ORACLE for about 3 years.
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Well, my Clipper was called 'redabas' ( anyone remember THIS?), and it was my first post-basic experience.
Peter
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Does any one out there remember using Apricot Xens or Xi's or for that matter does any one remember a machine called the "Sirius"
Note: these were from an era just before the rise of the PC clone
I started using GW-BASIC on the sirius (sending escape codes to the screen to set inverted color (green) was clever stuff back then ), after that I progressed on to Turbo Pascal on the Apricots
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I first learned Algol on an Elliot 803, which had an engineer run diagnostics on it every morning. The compiler was stored on 35mm magnetic film, and the command console had a row of button from which you entered commands in Octal. This compiler did have the capability of handling 'inline' machine code instructions in Octal of course. The English Electric (ICL) 450 which I used after that even had a line printer and disc drives. It also had a Cobol compiler.
Happy programming!!
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I've heard of this before -- anyone know more about it? Are there good compilers out there?
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I've heard of Modula 2 before. It was some Pascal derivative that came out (I think) before Ada became widely known. I remember seeing a chess game in Compute! back in the early '80s that was written in Modula 2.
--Mike--
http://home.inreach.com/mdunn/
"That probably would've sounded more commanding if I wasn't wearing my yummy sushi pajamas."
-- Buffy
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All of my college courses used Modula2 (88-94). It was a Pascal syntax with C-style #includes. You grouped your functions into modules (files), wrote some header files to go with them and included the headers where you needed the functions - just like C/C++. This helped teach us about modularization and procedures - which were big shocks for all of us Commodore and Apple BASIC people.
I bought an M2 compiler for my Amiga the summer before college started. It was quite a change from BASIC - much more powerful and elegant. But, compared to C, it is (was, at least) more of a teaching/learning language and less of a development language.
-c
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Back when it was BASIC and people could rattle off "Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" in their sleep. That's when I started.
I had some Timex/Sinclair model; I forget what exactly (not the 99/4a, though). But anyway, that's where I got started. I didn't do much besides enter sample programs from the manual.
Then in 4th grade I took an after-school class on Apple //e's. From there I moved on to the C= models - VIC-20, C=64, then C=128. I even submitted a C=128 BASIC program to Compute!'s Gazette, but it got rejected. It was an equation grapher; this was back before graphing calculators were affordable.
--Mike--
http://home.inreach.com/mdunn/
"That probably would've sounded more commanding if I wasn't wearing my yummy sushi pajamas."
-- Buffy
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I think the pinnacle of my programming experience was in 8th grade when I finally worked out how to write my name - underlined - in the centre of a TRS-80 screen using BASIC. I figured I'd achieved all there was to achieve so didn't touch a computer for another 4 years.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Ah, the TRS-80. We'll never see engineering like that again.... I hope Did yours have the expansion unit with extra memory, or the vanilla 16K?
In some sick and twisted way I really miss cassette tape storage....
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What the hell is a TRS-80? Is it a computer or a calculator (Texas Inst. call theirs T-somthing)?
I guess I must be relatively new to the computing scene as my first computer was a P75 with 16MB RAM and Windows 95 .
Keeping in topic though, my learning-language was C. Since then it has been C++, HTML (technically not a programming language), JavaScript, Visual Basic (i'm still learning), MFC (Yes I know it's not a seperate language, but it still requires a learning curve). I never learnt BASIC, but I guess from the name that is was the forerunner of the VB language - back before my time.
David Wulff
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The TRS-80 (pronounced "trash eighty") ) was a PC clone, I believe. I never had one, but the name is widely known (well, widely known among folks my age and older!)
TRS stands for Tandy Radio Shack, btw.
--Mike--
http://home.inreach.com/mdunn/
"That probably would've sounded more commanding if I wasn't wearing my yummy sushi pajamas."
-- Buffy
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It actually pre-dated the IBM-PC era by 4 or 5 years. It didn't run MS-DOS, but rather booted right into Basic from powerup displaying the cautious but encouraging prompt 'Ready?'
I believe it ran on a Z80 processor (but I'm getting foggy now), which is where the '80' came from.
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It depended on what model of TRS-80 you are talking about.
I believe Model I's (with 4k, the first computer I ever messed with) booted from rom.
Model III's (I think, memory hazy as this was a long time ago) ran either CP/M or TRS-DOS(bleeecch!). They were Z/80 based. The expansion bay for it was 3 8" drives built into a desk that weighed a ton.
I still remember the Model I's grand total of 3, yes 3 possible error messages. They were "What?", "How?" and "Sorry."
Jim Wuerch
www.miwasoft.com
Quote from my readme files:
"This is BETA software, and as such may completely destroy your computer, change the alignment of the planets and invert the structure of the universe."
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You are absolutely correct, I can't believe my memory of this is as foggy as it is. I owned both a Model I (but alas never got the expansion module), and had a Model III that I upgraded to floppies with an expansion kit from ... Pertec?
I think the expansion kit you are referring to was actually for the Model II, which was the "business" machine that ran on the stunningly fast Z80a processor. Maybe I'll see if I can dig up some info from Tandy...
I remember (not very fondly) the What? How? and Sorry. Messages. We should have seen then what the future of Microsoft's descriptive error messages would be like
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Wow. My first PC was a DX4-100, after years of hating IBM in favour of Apple and then Amiga. A 'Trash80', as they were known, was a computer sold by Tandy, I *think* Z80 based, hence the name, but overall a poor attempt to compete with the Apple ][. ( My true colours showing through... )
Christian
The content of this post is not necessarily the opinion of my yadda yadda yadda.
To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion.
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Ah, yeah, I started with BASIC too, and in 4th Grade. It was on a Commodore Pet. Then I had a Timex/Sinclair 1000 to play with at home. A whopping 2K of RAM, with the 16K RAM expansion pack. A wonder of engineering, the pack was held on by a thin row of pins and merely pressing too hard on the tiny keyboard was enough to knock the RAM module out and force a reboot.
This made it hard to write programs, because just about every keystroke could make you reboot - rebooting was quick, but unfortunately, there was no hard drive or even floppy disk to work from. I had to use a tape-recorder to save anything. It took a full two minutes to save or restore a dozen line BASIC program. Because of the frequent memory module mishaps, I was forced to do a save every few lines to be save, then also a restore every four or five lines after the memory fell out. (No good way to stabilize it the way it was designed).
Despite this, I stuck it out and managed to type in a program that drew (quite crudely, but passably) pixel by pixel, the profile of the space shuttle. (Pixels on this machine being reasonably large black squares).
Needless to say, that first experience made me VERY paranoid of machines giving out on my as I worked on them, and so I have the habit now (sometimes almost unconciously) of saving whatever I'm working on with almost psychotic frequency. Every pause is a time to save. Every paragraph. Sometimes every sentence. But it doesn't slow me down at 100 wpm.
Crazy or not, I can say that in 20 years of using computers, I have never EVER lost any data.
I still remember some of those old BASIC games. I modified a few for more "fun". Mostly I just played them. Miner. Lawn. Some cool text adventure game for the Apple II/e that a friend of mine had. I miss the Infocom games too.
-D
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Like you, I started on a Sinclair model using a ZX-80 (or something like that). It was 1980 and I was in first grade... The funny thing was that I did not speak a single word of English, but I was programming happily in BASIC.
("FOR"? That the loop thingy)..
As for now, I've been doing C/C++ for 8 years. But the truth is that I dreaded C for so long, I had actually spent 5 years writing in Assembly before I was forced to learn C..
-Oz
---
Grab WndTabs from http://www.wndtabs.com to make your VC++ experience that much more comfortable...
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I remember in University we all had to tell the class what languages we knew (so we could get a feel for the collective skill set). There was the usual Pascal, C, C++ etc, and finally one guy with long hair, black clothes and a beat up old electric guitar timidly raises his hand and says "x86 assembler". That was the only language he knew, and man, could that guy churn out the code. (plus he had great taste in music )
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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You're all children! (smugly spoken by a grey-haired veteran) -- BASIC on Commodores, TRS-80s, and ZX-80s? For shame -- how about BASIC on a real minicomputer, namely an HP 2110? Now that was BASIC -- no screens, just an ASR-33 Teletype banging away through rolls of paper at 110 baud.
Seriously, my first language was FORTRAN IV (using the WATFOR compiler) on an IBM 360/50, learned while I was still in high school in 1969 (that was when I learned to type, on an IBM 029 keypunch). From there I went on to a PDP-8 using paper tape and the front panel toggle switches, programming in machine code and an odd thing called FOCAL (kind of a FORTRAN and BASIC cross).
Since then, I think I've gone through at least a dozen programming languages, and another dozen system architectures, and I'm still learning (the reason I love this business so much).
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My first experience was with a Commodore64. Typed in my program, and went to run it, and it crashed. I lost everything, indignant I vowed never to touch a computer again exclaiming.. "They're STUPID!"
It wasn't til my crappy TI-81 wouldn't do some of the nifty stuff that the other's TI-85s were, that I started programming again.. heh heh.. one piece of advice, when your feeling clever and decide to show your math teacher what you can do... be prepared for two math tests the next time around.
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My first home-computer was also a Commodore64. Writing programs and store them on a tape !!! (fortunately I had the program turbo-tape, someone remembers that ?)
In school we used Apple IIe in the first year. The second year we used the first PC's and used GW-BASIC.
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