

Ask HN: How old were you when you wrote your first program? - cmstoken

What was your story like? How old were you, and did you ever think you&#x27;d end up where you are today when you look back at those times?<p>It would be really amazing to hear your stories!
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duncan_bayne
7.

I was coding in Amstrad BASIC on a CPC 464. The program didn't work, because I
didn't understand the difference between strings and numbers.

I wrote out my listing and took it to my teacher at school, to ask why my
program didn't work.

This led to my first inkling that adults didn't have all the answers :)

My teacher had never used a computer before, didn't really understand the
problem, and certainly couldn't solve it. To her immense credit she clearly
explained all of those things at the time rather than bullshitting me, and
suggested I try to find an adult with an interest in computers. Basically, she
helped me develop me the skills to solve my problem.

Quite the formative experience, that was.

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simonblack
Quite old. I was in my mid 20s. But this was in the early 1970s.

It was a BASIC program. I was given about 20 80-column cards which I had mark
with a thick black pen in the relevant positions. I then gave the pack back to
the friend who had access to one of the early multi-user terminals in another
town and who could run it. He was impressed that it ran perfectly without any
syntax errors, but not that it was an infinite loop. <grin>

On the other hand, my first computer I had to build with a soldering-iron and
a very large box of parts in 1979 and that's what finally enabled me to begin
programming for real, in both BASIC and Assembly Language.

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everslick
10 or 11, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, BASIC. most likly i started by typing in the
examples from the book, working from there. changing lines of code, see what
it does to the program. some two years later i got a c64. the basic was a lot
worse, but it was the machine i got around my head to assembler, or at least
machine code - because i did'nt understand the concept of the assembler, but i
very well understood the machine-code-monitor in the final cartridge.

but rasterbars, and softscrollers with (stolen) musik and sprites on the
bottom/top border, was as far as i ever got.

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informatimago
My first program on record is dated June 25th 1976; I was twelve. You may see
it on an emulator of the Mitra-15 LSE system I wrote recently at:

[http://nasium-lse.ogamita.com:8117/](http://nasium-lse.ogamita.com:8117/)

then type (C-s = control-s):

C-s CH C-s /BOURG C-s AP C-s BOUR C-s LI C-s 1 C-s EX C-s 1 C-s

(LSE = Langage Symbolique d'Enseignement, a French programming language used
in the 70s and 80s in the French schools). [http://nasium-
lse.ogamita.com](http://nasium-lse.ogamita.com)

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S4M
At 8 or 9 I wrote in an Amstrad CPC 464 a program in Basic that was moving the
letters of my dad's company. I remember that at the time, I understood the
for/next loop, but didn't think about the nested loop, so I wrote lots of code
that could have been a two or three liners. Something like:

    
    
        FOR I=1 TO 100
        PLOT I,1
        PLOT I,2
        ...
        PLOT I,50
        NEXT

~~~
duncan_bayne
Hey, another Amstrad user :) Do you still develop for the system (as a hobby,
of course)? There's an active community. E.g. check out:

[https://github.com/Octoate/cpc-sdcc-rom](https://github.com/Octoate/cpc-sdcc-
rom)

~~~
S4M
Well, the Amstrad is now either at my parents' house either in the garbage :(
so I can't use it sadly... It was in the late 80's that I was playing with it,
I'd love to check it again though.

~~~
duncan_bayne
There are some good emulators out there; I use WinAPE (
[http://www.winape.net/](http://www.winape.net/) ) under Wine, which works
nicely on both Linux Mint or FreeBSD.

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jpetersonmn
7-8 I supposed. My dad got us a commodore 64 and some book to write programs.
Went through those programs to figure out how things worked. All I made was a
text trivia game, was pretty lame. Then I didn't even have another computer
until I was 24ish... now I'm in my late 30s and have started writing programs
to automate my IT job.

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pshc
Sometime around 7. At the public library, I found a book titled "How To Make
Games." It went through the design and implementation of a text adventure game
in BASIC, with a full program listing in the back. I discovered that our
family computer had a copy of QBasic 1.0, and from there I was hooked.

Being a little kid, I never thought seriously about the future :)

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nostrademons
10\. It was a text-based choose-your-own-adventure game in Apple II Basic
running on a Mac LC.

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BronzeEagle
12\. It was a console based tic-tac-toe game in C++

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haidrali
20

