Re: first computer program

[http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert (Robert)]

I mentioned this before, but my dad brought home a bunch of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 machines which his work was
throwing out.  So, I started with that.  It has some basic games (golf was
pretty cool), but I made my first madlibs program in a COBOL-like
programming language called EASAL
(http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/datapro/70C-480-01_7404_Honeywell_200_2000.pdf
) in 1977.  My dad helped me to learn EASAL.  After that, I taught
assembly to myself (my dad said he couldn't help me there).  After that,
there was a primitive version of BASIC for the Datapoint 2200, which I
tried, but only did math stuff, like drawing circles, blah, blah, blah.

When I entered junior high, they had a DEC PDP 8 machine using DEC tape.
There was BASIC on that machine, but it was intolerably slow (core memory)
and was very popular and I didn't use it much.  In high school, at first,
all they had was a tty connected to MIT; you had to sign up and never got
a chance to use it.  Then, they installed a LOGO Machine
(https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6252/AIM-375.pdf ) which
had vector graphics, and I learned Logo.  After that, my high school got a
DEC PDP 11 .  That's where my real experience started.  At first, they
only had print terminals and in my math class, we were supposed to use APL
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language) ) and learned
that.  Eventually, VT-100s were obtained and that's where I really learned
Unix V7.  Only Bourne shell was available.  I learned to program Pascal.
A year after that, BSD 2.8 was installed on the PDP 11 and I learned C
(and I tried out LISP as well, but didn't do much there), and wrote a
maze-like game and then, of course, snake.  I used C-shell there.

It was all downhill from there.

http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert/archives/personal/2024/msg00565.html