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In this day when downloads under 1MBS is slow, I wonder how many people know that a card deck box could only hold about 40K. (500 cards, 80 bytes per card. Oh yeah signed bytes, 9 holes per byte) Many full length programs were less than half a box or reading half a box could take over 10 seconds
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Since I started my computer programming by flipping switches on the front of a bare-bones PDP-8 I was probably as computer literate as a 19 year old student could be in 1972.
I quickly moved to assembly language on an Intel 8008 (with a brief spell on the 4004 while waiting for the prototype 8008 to arrive direct from Intel) on a dedicated card that I designed and built myself as a project for my sandwich course with BT (then the GPO).
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I'm so old I can remember when 'Duktape' was called 'Duct Tape'.
And why.
Duktape? Dooktarrpay?
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d@nish wrote: ...you wrote your first program?
Very. First off, it wasn't a program written by me but a long listing from a book into building speakers enclosures (Radio Shack) - me and a buddy skipped classes to take turns entering the whole thing into one of the school lab's TRS-80s... got the supervisor to help us out on attaching a recorder to save it to tape... he asked us if we had ran the program - what do you mean RUN the program? <- us.
Rookie lab assistant comes in with the tape recorder, connects it to the computer, one ZAP! on the screen and I guess I was literate enough to understand the power of the static charge: the bloke caused the TRS-80 to reset and we lost 2 hours of typing in a microsecond. I had read about that in Popular Electronics late 70s.
Six months after me and my posse were banned from the computer lab for a month for installing games in all the lab machines. It could have been that or the "fake" report cards we manufactured for those people in need of presenting something more palatable to their parents than the official ones 
-- RP
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Very...
My first programming experience was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 connected to a TV. Working the graveyard shift, I stayed up one morning to punch in a sample program from book or maybe it was in it's documentation. Hated the membrane keyboard. Hours and a few cups of coffee later I had a battleship game running in console basic. Then I wondered if I could modify it some it could continue to plot the cannon shot up beyond the top of TV screen. I made the change. Try it. It worked. I was hooked.
Of course there was no storage. As soon as I turned it off, everything was gone.
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I was 8 in the start of eighteens, with my brother's brand new Commodore 64, when he was out to play football... 
I didn't speak any word in english, and all user manual was ONLY in english. I started to learn English because I saw the results of keywords when I wrote programs...
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I wrote a sorting program on a Flexowriter and fed the paper tape it into EDSAC 2 at Cambridge University c. 1963. All that I knew about computers was from popular reading about "electronic brains" and the lectures I received from Maurice Wilkes - great researcher but very boring teacher! So I guess I was pretty illiterate!
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Peter Grogono wrote: reading about "electronic brains"
I have this book, "Electronic Brains" written in 1945 in my library.
It states the estimated worldwide market for computers was for maybe as many as five of them.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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The book I remember best was "Faster than Thought", edited by B V Bowden and published in 1953. I was about 12 when I read it and I did not understand very much!
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IP addresses were defined much later, so it's capacity is much greater than 5. When it was defined it was determined it would have all the communication addresses computers would ever need. Shows how good we humans are at capacity planning when it comes to computers.
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OK, if we skip over my TRS-80 Basic days, and some assembler, we get to my first C program. It was a port of an assembler for a dedicated terminal, to be written in C for an IBM PC.
Now, at that time, Beyond "printf", I had know idea at all about the C standard library, particularly, I knew nothing about malloc & free, so everything was hard allocated as module level variables.
I wrote at length about it before: http://herbsutter.com/2011/10/16/your-first-c-program/#comment-3822[^]
I also dug up the source code to my SECOND major C program (circa 1989), and posted in on GitHub:
https://github.com/jamescurran/HonestIllusion/tree/master/PCT[^]
Truth,
James
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James Curran wrote: I had know idea at all
Phonetically correct, but contextually incorrect.correct: I had no idea at all
Someone else wrote "I now that..." which is both phonetically and contextually incorrect. I have no idea why I didn't feel compelled to correct him two(sic) (There is so much trampling of the English language, I had to get into the act.)
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Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away...
we technicians were allowed to learn some programming in our
free time. Fortran and punch cards of course. So me and a buddy
wrote a 'game of life' program that printed the generation
patterns on a line printer. We destroyed several trees
worth of paper. Now at 71, I still program for fun...
(Win 7, C#, intel i7, almost no printing)
73
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d@nish wrote: Edit: The sole purpose of this post is to feel young.
You achieved the opposite:
When I wrote my first program, windows didn't exist, C++ didn't exist.
I did now what an OS was, however: I had the commented assembly listing on my desk! 
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I should say I wanted to feel young. I have no clue what you all are blabbering about. I wan't even born at that time.
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My buddy who got me started on computers had given me the book on assembler programming a PDP-8.
For two weeks I struggled, trying to understand registers, opcodes, and binary.
He and his buddy took me to the computer center and while he was off doing something on another computer, his buddy says, "Psst, wanna write a program?"
He started FOCAL and had me type
1.1 Type "HELLO." Now type "GO" and press Return.
It printed
HELLO I yelled, "THAT'S IT? That's all I have to do?!?"
And I was off to the races.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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Ah, must predate the "HELLO WORLD" standard intro.
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black screen!? That's funny! When I was 14, I didn't know what a computer was. When I was a freshman in college I heard they had a computer that no student would ever get near. My junior and senior year had no room for silliness but I still got to see a computer that was booted from paper tape and you could write assembler to it. I basically flat-lined my last semester I had to drop out of a 3 point lab because I needed the time to finish my other classwork. I'd spent 4 semesters at over 20 points per and now I had to spend a whole semester for 3 points. No, I'm going to do something more. So I signed up for computer classes, something completely useless, certainly nothing that business was interested in.
Screens!!! Try typing code on cards, turning them in in the evening, getting them back the next day. The whole compile ruined by a typo.
So, I finally graduated with a BS in Mechanical Engineering and I got my first job (computer programmer) by building a fence. I spent almost a year where you turned your cards in (morning or night, made no difference) and the next day you get your printout.
Before you turned them in, you had to create them. With 60 progammers in the building and one keypunch machine we could use, we generally gave the punching to the keypunch pool where you turn it in in the morning and get it back in the evening.
2 years after starting, I transfered to people who needed more of a scientific background. The computer stored files!!!! I had a 300 baud teletype. That meant I could talk directly to the computer. I could ask it to compile and run and in a few seconds I got results. !!!screens!!!, no heat sensitive paper that at best, in theory, produced 30 characters a second, but in reality almost 2 a second, certainly faster than I could type, but not much.
Microsoft showed up over a decade after I graduated and it took them a while to come up with the windows OS.
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A few lines of Fortran in 1966 to calculate pi to 100 places on a CDC 3200 using the ArcTan expansion which I'd just learned.
Most digits were zero, so I learned something about precision.
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I was just full of awesomeness when I wrote a complete calculator emulator (complete with transcendent functions) using CDL (Computer Design Language) running on a CDC Cyber 74 mainframe back in 1977. I aced that class. The prof said he didn't believe I could pull it off it had never been done before. It did cost me an F in all my other courses that quarter but it sure was worth it! 
Edit: Oh, you said how ILLITERATE was I ... OK, I didn't yet know what a CRT terminal was. I wrote the whole thing using an 029 keypunch, card reader (of course) and line printer.
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029 keypunch? That were looxury!
We had 026s only.
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Well, at Ga Tech we had both, but the 029's were, of course, the first ones taken! 
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1986 I was 3,
wrote a batch file to display hello world,
I understood that the operating system was called disk os aka DOS because I had to load the floppy's one at a time as the computer loaded as there were no hard drives.
Everyone before the year 2000 grew up with the technology and understand it before we use it.
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Windows was something you looked through when I wrote my first program, which was in FORTRAN, punched in cards and run on an IBM/360. I knew something about the operating system and assembler and bytes and bits and Boolean. My Dad was designing a home computer with transistors on printed circuit boards and showed his design to me.
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