I was chatting with jepri recently and checked out his home node. He lists the following as his first program:

10 BEEP
20 GOTO 10
[download]

Boy, did that bring back memories! It’s been a long time since I have thought about my early days of playing with computers and I can’t help but smile as I reminisce. The first program that I remember writing (besides the obligatory “hello world”) was a simple tank game that I started working on back in 1982. Basically, the computer randomly placed two tanks (two array locations) and randomly fired shots from each tank. It would display to the screen the tank’s alternating shots and the first tank to hit the other was the winner. Of course, it was completely random and not really a game. I was just playing around and having a blast.

My first really significant program was a graphics processor that I wrote in 1984 for the old TRS-80 (Trash 80) computer. Since only low-resolution graphics were available, I had to use several screens to get a decent picture. The program would write the separate screens to different files and use the data from all of those files to send the simple line drawings to a dot-matrix printer.

Around the same time I was taking a word processing class that required I learn ten-key by touch on the computer’s numeric keypad. I thought it was really boring so I hacked into the program and had it create randomly generated scores for me (around the same score level that I currently had, to avoid arousing suspicions).

Ahh... those were the days.

I would love to hear about some of the first programs that other monks have written that may have a "nostalgic" feeling for them.

Cheers,
Ovid

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