I can't remember my very first program (although it probably resembled the one Ovid posted) but I can remember one of the ones I wrote around then which was based on those 'choose your own adventure' books. It was a story that took you through a haunted house and presented you with two choices after each chunk of narrative. There was one correct path that took you to the treasure and many, many ways to die--if you made a wrong turn you'd die, but you might not die until you'd made 20 more choices.

It was pretty simple code, consisting of little other than a few sounds, prints--and gotos: it was horrible spaghetti code. I'd allot myself 200 lines for finishing up a dying branch, and then decide to string things along, so I'd make line 210 (the right thread) goto another 200 lines ahead, and make line 200 (the wrong thread) goto 220, and continue until I hit 400 and then realize I needeed more space... I can remember having a piece of paper that just consisted of line numbers and a note as to what thread was being picked up there.

For some reason I stopped writing programs after that and didn't write any until high school, where I encountered a teacher who was obsessed with flow charts. The agony I suffered in that class kept me away from programming for several more years.

I (vaguely) remember writing a QBASIC subroutine that would take a string and a substring, and search that string for an instance of a substring, so the program would continue depending on the user input. I was greatly obsessed with Zork at the time, particularly Return to Zork, and after buying the original Zork games at a pawnshop set about trying to write my own. There were many CASE-statements, let me tell you!

I forget why I stopped... after having my "batch file commander" stage and my "write a QBASIC program for everything I can think of" stage I got fed up the languages I had to work with. Mom and Dad got me a Borland Turbo C++ compiler for my birthday one year and I just got frustrated with that too... didn't make it very far with the infinitely more complex language (at least it seemed so at the time). I believe I dropped programming altogether and started hitting the BBS scene and focusing on hardware. Beautiful, sweet, simple hardware. =) That was the end of that.

A few years later I discovered mIRC-script. A year or two later, Linux, databases and Perl. It was downhill from there!

Ah, memories...

Alakaboo

...a short time later...

Great scott, I found it! LOL... You aren't going to believe this:

DEF fnCheck (Dir$, Targ$, Length)
fnCheck = 0
FOR X = 1 TO 50
IF MID$(Dir$, X, Length) = Targ$ THEN fnCheck = 1
NEXT X
END DEF

INPUT "String to search: ", Dir$
INPUT "String to find: ", Targ$
Targ$ = UCASE$(Targ$)
Dir$ = UCASE$(Dir$)
IF fnCheck(Dir$, Targ$, LEN(Targ$)) = 1 THEN
PRINT "Is in string."
ELSE
PRINT "Not in string."
END IF
[download]

{dies of laughter} I also found a H2O trivia program for 6th grade science class, a modem chat program for two people to connect via analog modem and type with each other, an ASCII flat file parser that would build a webpage out of a small database, and a program I wrote that would search a database of the Windows 95 CAB files and tell you which CAB the file you need is in. Oh, brother!

Remarkable how similar this account is to my own experiences. I started programming on the Apple ][+, and quickly began making choose-your-own-adventure style games in Apple Basic. One of my very early games was "Smurf"*.

I wrote Smurf on my friend's machine, and stored it on a audio cassette tape. His father had decided that 5 1/4" floppy disk drives were too expensive, and hooked up an old cassette recorder instead... though he did splurge on a 100 baud modem. Anyway, I graduated to floppies as Apples started appearing in school, but lack of storage space remained a problem.

Thinking back on it, I'm sort of amazed at some of the things I wrote. My mind was so captivated by what I was doing, that I had no problem keeping track of God knows how many lines of totally unstructured code. Eventually, someone showed me subroutines. I thought about them, but soon decided that there was nothing you could do with them that you couldn't do with gotos.

The storage problem kept coming up. I couldn't afford many floppies, and they kept filling up with big games like Lode Runner, Oregon Trail and Karateka. Hence, I had to compress my code. Amongst other things, I recall systematically leaving all unnecessary whitespace out, and numbering my lines 1 2 3 4...

Eventually, though, things went bad. My efforts to make games using hires graphics in basic weren't panning out; they were too slow, and (as I knew nothing about video refresh rates or buffering) they flashed annoyingly. I knew I had to move on to "assembler", whatever that was, but nobody seemed to know how to program assembler.

And then the Macintosh came out. That killed it. The Computer for the Rest of Us shut me out in the cold. It was so cool in so many ways... but how the heck did you program the thing? Where was the prompt? I had no computers I knew how to program, and nobody seemed to know enough to help. My interest died, and I'm rather surprised that I ever wrote code again. Linux brought me back in from the cold.

And Perl made it fun. Perl is, IMHO, the coolest thing thing since Apple Basic. :-)

---

* This in itself requires a word of explanation. Today we are in quite a golden age for cartoons. In the early '80s, cartoons were mindless, bland, dreadfully condescending bits of fluff (not unlike most everything on TV). VCRs were for people with money, and it would be years until Robotech introduced people to the sophistication of Anime. So don't be too quick to excoriate what today would be pretty bad stuff. With elements of medieval fantasy and halfway creative art, the Smurfs were comparatively very, very interesting.

Ouch, my first were also spaghetti code, though I didn't get to adventure games until later.

I first programmed on a Commodore Pet, followed by the Vic-20, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Amiga 500, etc. Well, on the early ones, they tokenized the Basic so it fit better in the ~2.5K of RAM it had. But you could also enter it in a "shortened" format, using the first two letters, one shifted. And print was just a ?. Lines could be up to 255 characters long, but the editor would only handly up to 4 screen lines, which was either 22 chars or 40 chars, depending on which box. So I would write lines so full that when they were expanded, they were over 4 lines and I could not go back and edit them. All in the quest to save a few bytes of memory for line numbers, because 2.5K jsut is not a lot.

My first programs were games, something that always facinated me about computers. Now my efforts are a more directed, but a goal if I ever hit the lottery is to quit where I work and find a game company and "apprentice" to them. I am especially interested in trying to make computer players for games that feel like people.

=Blue
...you might be eaten by a grue...

My first program found the prime factorizations of numbers. I was taking an "intro to computers" course from the local college when I was in 7th grade. They didn't teach programming, but before long I found the source code (in BASIC) to one of the games and was able to understand enough that I tried programming before/after class. With my math background, I wasn't sure I could do, for example:

100 let x= x + 1
[download]

I also remember completely not understanding computers when I started that class:

Instructor: "We use programming languages to tell the computer what to do."
Me: "What if it says 'no'?"

10 SIN
20 GOTO HELL


10 HOME
20 SWEET
30 GOTO 10
[download]

As it turns out, my first real program was a tank game in qbasic. Tanks seem to be a real attraction. Two players controlled tanks which fought in a maze. The shots could bounce off walls. Then I improved it too much and it broke :( Actually, I don't think I written a program I haven't broken by adding too many features.

____________________
Jeremy

Yeah, there's no better way to start programming than messing with games. One of the first pieces of programming I ever did was modifying a few initial variables in the "Lemonade Stand" game on my Apple IIe. (It's so much more fun to start with a few thousand dollars.) Later on, I remember tweaking Microsoft's "Gorillas" QBasic program, adding a "nuclear bomb" option.

Ahh, those were the days.

--
Ryan Koppenhaver, Aspiring Perl Hacker
"I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave."

One of the very first tasks was to have TurboPascal to draw a circle on the screen. When the term was over I had my circle-script and I took Latin and quit programming for a good while.

neophyte

I cannot remember to my first program, because since I know perl I forgot every other languages and memories about them :-))) And since I know Linux I dont remember Windows :-)))

-- tune

Man, I cannot remember what the first thing I did was, but I do know I did it on a Tandy that was hooked up to my TV. My mom could not afford the then ubiquitous Atari 2600 so she got this thing from Radio Shack. It came with a cartridge for a game called dungeon and a another for BASIC. The best thing I remember writing was a trivia game that stumped my mom once. I was darn proud of that...

<myExperience>
$mostLanguages = 'Designed for engineers by engineers.';
$perl          = 'Designed for people who speak by a linguist.';
</myExperience>
[download]

I remember using an AppleII (bought for VisiCalc tax accounting on the farm) to write mathmatical calculation progs for college.   Something about determining gain and linear portion of curve given Q and who knows what else.   Must have been amplifier transistors - how analog.   {grin}

Bet I still have those 5" floppies around somewhere, wonder if they're still good?   Hmmm... Debian has an AppleII emulator.   Hmmm...
    cheers,
    Don
    striving for Perl Adept
    (it's pronounced "why-bick")

AgentM Systems nor Nasca Enterprises nor Bone::Easy nor Macperl is responsible for the comments made by AgentM. Remember, you can build any logical system with NOR.

After that, I sort of drifted away from programming, and came back just in time to take a year of Pascal in my senior year of Highschool, and that awful disaster drove me away from programming for about three years. Then I finally found C++ (hate it if you want, it's saner than Pascal), and about the same time started messing with actually running UNIX boxes instead of just using them, and then about 2 years ago I discovered Perl. First Perl program I wrote was one that randomly picked a sig file out of a directory and copied it to my .signature file.

My first program would have been for chemistry class, back in '74--our college had, um, a 360? 390? I don't remember--to solve the gas law, cube roots and all that stuff, in Fortran.

My first real original production item was in qbasic,in 1985. There was a piece of software called DataStar (right--part of the WordStar group), the first RDBMS I ever used. I was given a 6000-card mailing list, with people's interests, disinterests, phone numbers--you name it--and told to make it into a real mailing list. I did the whole thing from scratch (including the data entry). Then I had to write a qbasic program to use the data--much easier.

My first paid professional job (in 1993) was done in, god help me, Pascal--it was a brute force (I thought I could throw algebra at it, but I failed) enumeration of the possible bends and configurations of protein backbones.

I think I've said too much. Just remember what Saint Gracie Allen says:

They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it.

Basically, the bull came in from the right side, made it to the middle, squated, left a large suspicious heap, and continued it's path off the left side of the screen.

Then, a little stick figure man with a hat and broom followed the same path and pushed the heap off of the left side of the screen.

These basic techiniques allowed me to write my first game shortly afterwards : Moneybags!

Two bags on the screen, one bag contains a gold coin, the other a bomb. The user moves a cursor to one of the bags and either gets a point or dies.

wow

I really don't recall what my first program was (that I didn't just type in from a book). I remember the posh computer mags those days sometimes came with cassette tapes, so you didn't have to type in those 8k programs.

The only thing I remember programming is that at some point, I wrote an assembler of sorts for the Vic-20's 6502. I used that to help me write a "galaga" style shoot-em up game (I flatter myself ... it presented a field of moving "stars" that scrolled down the screen, and you could move through the field and shoot an occasional target that scrolled down but couldn't move left-to-right). Now, I bet I couldn't do anything nearly as 'sophisticated' without a lot of work =)

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

I don't remember what we programmed on the PDP (probably a couple math programs in fortran), but then we got some Commodore Pets.
I did a lame missile command style game and then there was an "animation" assignment. Besides the actual one I did a quick one that was more of a gordian(sp?) knot solution.
You could print horizontal line characters from top to bottom. There were eight of them. I printed that with no line return and then just looped.
That would wrap and it made a good impression of a wheat field being blown by the wind.
The teacher was a bit miffed when he found out it was a two line program.

a

The earliest I can recall for sure was a simple drawing program on an early Apple in BASIC. You used the arrow keys to move, the space bar to toggle from "draw" to "move", and the number keys to change the color.

I had some sort of earlier computer too, I think it was a Sinclair something (??) and I know I wrote some programs on that, but the only thing I can remember is that you actually stored your files on a regular audio tape, with a normal tape player, by audio and microphone extension jacks. You could actually listen to your programs (resembled the well-known "modem connect" noise, but had a distinct difference).

After a while, I managed to write one of those adventure games as well. I don't know how I managed to do all that string parsing ("DROP THE BOX", "KILL TROLL", "LIGHT THE LANTERN") and everything else involved in a language other than Perl. Where was Larry? :) So much spaghetti produced for so little output.

I remember writing one of those adventure games, too! The only problem was that I didn't want to be stuck with a simple two-word command. I wanted full "Zork sentence" capability. My program would scan through the input and take the first three letters of every word (limited memory) and match those up with the words in DATA statements. My test sentence (my dog, I remember it after 15 years!) was "hit the skeleton with the sword, take his ring and then walk north and touch the altar." It took 8 seconds for the BASIC program to parse that into numbers. Then, the program would branch to various parts of the program when it had a "verb" number and apply the action (if possible) to the "noun" number.

Since 8 seconds was too long for the program to parse the input string, I tought myself a little 8088 assembler and rewrote the routine in about a week. My goal was to get the program to start recognizing adjectives and compound-complex sentences, but then my roommate moved and took his computer with him. I didn't touch a computer again for another 9 years.

It's good to be back :)

Cheers,
Ovid

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c:\>edit testi.bat
@echo off
:alku
echo hello
pause
cls
echo hello world
pause
cls
goto alku
[download]

It's not exactly that but the principle's same. The first one that wasn't a test, that is.

For some reason he liked that computer more than I did...

Can you tell what each does and what kind of computer it might rub on.

Mystery Code 1:

start    LDY #$FF    
loop1    LDX #$FF  
loop2    DEX       
    BNE loop2  
    DEY        
    BNE loop1  
    RTS
[download]

mlt16   LDA #$00     
        STA $26
        STA $27
        LDX #$16     
nxtbt   LSR $21      
        ROR $20
        BCC align    
        LDA $26      
        CLC
        ADC $22      
        STA $26      
        LDA $27      
        ADC $23      
align   ROR A        
        STA $27      
        ROR $26
        ROR $25
        ROR $24
        DEX          
        BNE nxtbt    
        RTS
[download]

The first correct answer to both questions will be sent a genuine picture/jpeg of an orginal single-sided, single-density 8 inch floopy disk drive (I think maybe). mitd-Made in the Dark
'My favourite colour appears to be grey.'

Both run on 6502 processors.

Code #1 is a delay loop.
Code #2 is a 16 bit unsigned multiply (multiplies $20/$21 by $22/$23, returning the result in $24/$25/$26/$27).

Update: OK, I couldn't resist. I dug out the 6502 assembler and emulator to test code #2. Now, admittedly, the emulator could be broken, but I didn't get any results that made sense for either a multiply or divide. I spent about 45 minutes playing with this, and the simulator seems to be executing as I would expect. But the resulting $26/$27 locations never come up with any valid values using $20/$21 and $22/$23 as inputs (the higher address is the high byte of each word, so I had byte ordering correct).

And since code #1 was going for maximum delay, you could have gotten a little more delay by changing it to:

start	LDY #$FF    
loop1	LDX #$FF  
loop2	DEX       
	BNE loop2  
	DEY        
	BNE loop2  
	RTS           

You're resetting X to #$FF, when it's already 0, losing 255 free 2 cycle delays.

--Chris

e-mail jcwren