Did you learn to program in the 1980's?

The one I respect most has a copy of numerical recipes in C on his desk – not that he needs to open it

he’s probably got a chm of it 😉

ICL System 35! OH yeah, we moved up from Teletypes. Only 12 between 30 of us. We took food in so you never left the terminal. I also remember if you hit ctrl-8 the system would respond with ‘DUMP IN PROGRESS’ which led a certain generation of students to fully understand this conversation

Can’t believe John’s left his terminal
He needed a CTRL-8, couldn’t wait a moment longer

70s here – our first computing lessons were writing BASIC on squared paper that went off to be punched onto cards, then next week we’d get the cards back and a print of the output. The transcriber had usually made a typo which meant the program had fallen over.

Then we used to walk down to the local uni to use their Data General Eclipse system, our prized posessions was a roll of paper tape with a Star Trek game on it. SRS, LRS and all that.

Assembler on 6502s, Fortran, Algol, Cobol, OCCAM (high 5’s Andytherocketeer), Ada…

I keep telling folks how easy it is these days, just Google whatever your bug/error message says and someone will have posted a complete solution for you to nick. Back in the day we had a wall full of VMS manuals, and no clues.

Late 70’s here, on an early Pet. Still do a bit, but progressed to Labview. (text is so 1970’s)

70s (79/80) for me when first started — at school – – Fortran – wrote out code long hand on sheets, they were posted to Aberdeen and coded up – result came back a week later, usually syntax error 🙁

We had a great maths / CompSci teacher for balance, he’d worked at ICL then went into teaching. old school.

Didn’t have a home PC until about 1995!!

Mid 70s for me, the days of punched tapes and cards. We had a ten minute, once a week chance to run the programmes we’d written. via a terminal to Stafford Uni. If it didn’t work, no problem, you had a week to put it right before you could try it again. I couldn’t believe how simple programming has become, having done an HND in computing a few years ago.

First job was as a Trainee Programmer and all programmes were written on coding sheets to be keyed-in by the Punch Room ladies. Got a slap from the Snr Programmer if after desk-checking the listing it didn’t compile first time – they reckoned it cost £100 per compile, and I was earning less than that a week 😯

Started with Cobol and then moved onto Natural Adabas, later Easytrieve+/Cobol DL/1.

Stayed in IT my entire life, although I’ve not programmed since the mid-90’s.

perchypanther

10 *FX247
20 PRINT “My teacher is an idiot”;
30 GOTO 10

Run

Adding the crucial Basic-jedi line 10, that disables the “BREAK” key!

Que huge amusement as teach comes over, presses break to stop himself being slagged off by your Micro, only to discover he CAN’t stop it…….

#goodforlaughs

Oh yes, remember that book, went from programming at home in my spare time as a hobby to going to uni to do Computer Science, where upon I was sick of the sight of computers so spent lots of hours riding a mtb on cannock chase pre trail centre days, where you would sometimes be the only mtb on there. Managed a third but kindled a love of cycling that is still strong today.

For minor modifications we used an EPROM PROGRAMMER to change the HEXADECIMAL values of the BYTES at specific MEMORY LOCATIONS wohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

And then forget to update the source code yeah baby

How we laughed when our German customer’s steel mills came to a standstill *cough*

We may have used the work EPROM programmer to copy backup BBC computer ROMS.

Made a fruit machine game for the Oric 1 then suffered coding fatigue forever after.

Think my bookshelf is a bit of a time capsule of 90’s and early 00’s programming! Even has Principles of Compiler Design (the dragon book) which should please Alex 🙂

Only essential missing is Operating Systems by Tannenbaum and that’s on the next shelf down. Only ones I really still use are the TCP/IP Steven’s books.

Mr B – I salute you. That is awesome. Tannerbaum I think was the one who said ‘the great thing about standards are there are so many to choose from’. Steven’s TCP/IP books are the bible. I used to be able to decode TCP headers without even reference to his books. Ah happy days 😉

Thanks. I use to know all that shit too, now I mostly just shuffle boxes about on visio 🙁

I managed to get a sprite of a hot-air balloon bouncing around the screen on my Commodore 64. Took me about three days. That was as far as my programming career ever got.

My Dad was involved with the development of the BBC Micro, so we used to get a new version of the OS every week to try out on an Acorn System 3 and report back bugs etc.

I work in a building with hundreds of them – it may be my personal experience but the ones who learned with those books in those days aren’t geeks – they are extremely smart and have a far better understanding what they are doing than the “new generation”

There’s a difference between geeks and nerds 🙂 A good geek is a valuable asset.

it may be my personal experience but the ones who learned with those books in those days aren’t geeks

People who learned with those books usually had an understanding of what was actually going on. Met plenty of programmers who didn’t have a clue about how an operating systems worked or what was going on at a hardware level.

There are three people doing the same job as me. However I’ve got a far broader knowledge in more areas of IT than they have, because I was the kind of kid who read books like this when they were out playing football 🙂

However I’ve got a far broader knowledge in more areas of IT than they have

…..except Word 😀

Yes, except Word 🙂

**** Word.

Yep learnt Unix at college (’84)on a teletype printer; had to type lean over lift the typewriter bar, check the response, swear, re-type it correctly…
COBOL was using punchcards which you had to queue up to get compiled & we had to have the code running correctly in 3 compiles. Which always led to fun at when 50+ students were trying to cram their final compile in the day before it was due.