From my experience, trying to learn basic on the c64 when I was 9 or so (and then assembly on the Amiga) was too much work and effort, just to see any results. Even getting something to show up on screen was a lot of work. I'm a pretty visual kind of person, and I like seeing the progress and results of my work instantly, so by not seeing anything from my programming efforts, it wasn't much encouragement to get into it more. I should say that the internet wasn't around then, so trying to find documentation and tutorials was pretty hard, and the documentation I did have weren't really tutorials that guide you, but more like manuals.. I eventually gave up, and that's not to say I didn't give it a fair shot!
So how and when were you introduced to programming, did you find it as challenging as I did (maybe it was a breeze to you?), and what made you decide that this was what you wanted to do?
On a side note, reading [url="www.sumea.com.au/sprofile.asp?member=70"]Jacana's profile[/url] - she only touched code about 2 years ago. I think it's great that she picked it up so quick. I know that a lot of programmers start off at an early age, and I wonder if picking it up later in life is more challenging..
Yeh I used do play with code for my C64 when I was a kid, but I didn?t really start playing with code until I got a 486 when I was about 12. Found qbasic and started to make text based adventure games, then asci maze games.
Went through the languages, VB, turbo pascal, ?my hp calculator?, C?.
Then I found this wicked library for C called ?Allegro? and I used that to make heaps of dos games, it was a graphics + sound library that was designed to make indie games and that?s what I did for a long time. Until I tried to make a 3d game, in dos its not that easy, so I had to move to windows so I could play with opengl + directx.
I coded all the way through high school and ended up failing every subject because all I did was code and drink beer. But that?s good because now all I do is code and drink beer too, so I?ve had my priorities right for a long time.
I just feel sorry for the kids out there today, with these new windows machines that don?t come standard with a compiler of any kind, and no dos so they don?t have to play around with commands, what are the coders of the future going to turn out like?
quote:Originally posted by lava_monkey
I just feel sorry for the kids out there today, with these new windows machines that don?t come standard with a compiler of any kind, and no dos so they don?t have to play around with commands, what are the coders of the future going to turn out like?
HTML monkeys *snicker*
[;)]
I started learning how to program when I was in grade 9 at high school. Ever since then I just havent been able to get enough of it [:)]. I picked everything up fairly easily. Starting with C (because that's what my mate Ty knew), and then finding a really good C++ primer book.
Edit: I should note that I didn't learn AT school, just at that age [:)].
i did some pascal when i was in highschool, but i started *real* programming when i started my software engineering degree in uni. Uni has served me well, i'm in my final year now and do think i am a pretty competent programmer in most of the common languages (c/c++/java) and in the more obscure ones (prolog/haskell/mercury). I really got into games programming around the middle of last year when i did a subject on computer graphics theory.
I mainly started programming when i started my comp. sci. degree at uni in '99, although i did do very minimal QBASIC coding when i was in about yr7 and yr8 (about '93). I didn't really know what i wanted to do with my life until around last year or the year before (other than it would involve computers), so i wasn't hugely motivated about coding through uni. I enjoyed programming, but i didn't program anything i enjoyed (if that makes sense). Since i've gotten into programming for games, i've become a lot more motivated about it, and have pushed myself a lot more to learn things.
Thats me...
CYer, Blitz
I started programming QBASIC when I started high school, then next year I progressed to Visual Basic, then to C and Assembly in the next year then C++ etc... I learned Java in the first year of Uni, and then in the next year I've learnt some others like Miranda, Lisp, COBOL, SQL etc (now I am in third year of Uni). But the same as AndrewM I didn't learn them *at* school, just at the same time as school.
And now I mainly program in C++ / Assembly and Java for Uni, although it depends what subjects I am doing.
(Compressed version)
I started around grade 6 with Apple basic, then learnt GWBASIC on the 286, then QBasic, then a little bit of C (My dad bought me Microsoft Visual Studio 1.0!) couldn't hack win32, so then Visual Basic (around grade 9), then went back and learnt C++ in the latter half of year 12, in which I did very poorly (failed english, and lost first in IPT because I wasn't paying attention), as all I did was code my first game engine, which was lost due to a partition failing (actually was a good thing, early code is yucky).
That's all I can remember, and I'm not sure if the times are correct...
quote:Originally posted by Souri
On a side note, reading [url="www.sumea.com.au/sprofile.asp?member=70"]Jacana's profile[/url] - she only touched code about 2 years ago. I think it's great that she picked it up so quick.
Wow people do read that *grin*
I had a Tech Support job that I did for about 20 months. I started off doing phone support and just hated it. I was then moved to inhouse support which I liked better - but not enough.
In that 20 months I was thinking about what else I wanted to do. And my logic to get where I am went something like this: "Hey, I picked up HTML kinda quick. I don't see why programming could be much harder." Yes yes! Pick yourself up from the floor now and stop crying with laughter.
But really that was my logic at the time. So I quit work, took some time off, and started back to school.
While I was waiting to get into the Software Dev course I spent one semester doing an Electronics course. I got to learn all about components and even make my own circut board. That was fun :)
So after I got into the dev course at mid year intake I picked up the stuff quite well. So the next logic was: "Ok, I like programming. Now what do I want to program."
Its scary to think I am just hitting my two year mark for programmming. I started the software dev course around July 01.
Wish I could answer better on it being harder to do as you get older. But the way I have gone is the only way I know :) I think its working for me.
Man some of you have a way more illustrious history than me! I was first exposed to code at about the age of 6 or 7 maybe? Little bit of GW-Basic on a very old 286.
But really I was a weiner...I moved on to QBasic shortly after and stuffed around with that for a few years never actually making anything but my brother's primary school enivornment project where we made a game called "Environmental Apes" and it was the most pants-tastic game.
I have the code printed out somewhere in this house, but I'm ***not*** going to show anyone how crap that truly was.
Then I moved on to Visual Basic where I realised that it's only good for making (very slow) 'appz'. Eventually my brother grabbed C for Dummies and he learnt C without a compiler over a couple of weeks, then he programmed something in C, I looked at it, and that was basically my first lesson in 'C'.
We kept going with C (Borland C++ compiler) for a while, right up until about 5 years ago - we even made a DOS texture mapper which ran like garbage because Borland was a 16bit compiler with flaky 32 bit support. I learnt alot of assembly in my DOS programming forays - I find with Windows programming a *lot* of the overheads nowadays aren't really within the CPU as such - it's more about good algorithm design, also Windows compilers have become quite good. Then I played around with OGL and MSVC++ to make some crappy little graphics - not any games though. Lately I just toy around with DJGPP and trying to finish my DOS-based magnum opus, and then play with windows.
I've never really diced with Linux, but it looks like a bit of a mess :)
Overall - I've never really finished a single game (except for that Apes hack) and I'm hoping to change that by the end of this uni break...
To answer the whole "picking up programming later" issue - the best programmer I know picked up programming about 2 years ago. He's not much of a games programmer, really lacks the interest, but he's just insanely smart and constantly amazes me. I'm glad he's around because he's a good learning resource :) He teaches me a few things and I've been programming for a lot longer!
I actually still don't know much C++ except for some basics. We learnt Java at Uni (and I really passionately dislike it for games programming purposes) and I learnt some Pascal at one stage. But I wouldn't proclaim to be anything but a C/ASM programmer.
Hmm, first started with BASIC on the TRS-80 Colour Computer when I was.. ohh.. 9? I don't know why, I guess just because it was there. That got me interested. Got a C64 a few years later and because C64 BASIC was so horrifically limited I was forced to learn assembly to do anything fun. What a shame. [;)]
I started to write a lot of games on the '64, but never got very far with them. I later wished I'd heard of the demo scene at this time - if you're trying to write a game, and you get bored after just doing a 50fps parallax scroller, you got nothing. But if you're trying to write a demo, you got a routine!
Got an Amiga 500 when I was 17 (this was in 1991..) but didn't immediately start to program it. For a while there I was using the Amiga for BBSing and gaming and still coding on the '64. Finally bit the bullet, started to learn 68000 assembly and Amiga hardware, got into the demo scene, did stuff with Cydonia (hi Souri!).. I was active there for a few years but gradually lost interest as the Amiga died out..
From then on, it was nothing but boring corporate IT programming until last year, when I started doing some PS2 stuff (as well as PC/DirectX, Xbox & Gamecube) with Hemicube..
I was introduced to QBasic in high school about 6 years ago. I decided that I liked programming and wanted to learn more about it, so I managed to get my way in to a little-known computer course in the NSW curriculum (3 unit Computing Studies, my friend and I who did the course were the first and only two people to do it at our high school) where I learnt some basic computer science and was introduced to Visual Basic. I learnt pretty quickly that normal application programming is major boring shit, and also learnt to stay away from Visual Basic for games making purposes. For my assessment I wrote my first proper game in QBasic (which I later rewrote because the ASCII art annoyed me and I wanted to try out some proper graphics). Programming took a dive for me for the next few years, touched the basic stuff at TAFE and taught myself the basics of C. Finally got my act together and moved up to QLD in the dying months of 2001 to apply for the QANTM course I'd been wanting to do for a couple of years, got in first time on a scholarship, crammed an incredible amount of information in my head in a year, got a job, wrote out this brief history of when and why I started programming.
When:
1979 at Carringbush library (Richmond, Melbourne) after school - in basic... followed shortly by building my own Dream 6802 (which I still have!) It had a hex keypad and all programming was done in hex - you really learn a lot about computers when you program in hex :-)
Then I moved on to mark-sense cards when they got a computer at school, then a TI-99/4A, then PC's and Unix machines
Why:
It just seemed to be something I loved doing and I was good at, from the moment I first used a computer I was hooked. I wrote hundreds of programs that nobody ever saw - games/tools/graphics just for my own pleasure (got a few published in a book too)
I started back on the C64 when i was presented with some (photocopied) books on basic. I only really learned a handful of functions and wrote afew text based adventures, though since i didn't know how to read/write from disk i found myself running out of memory very quickly. I also made use of the C64's ellaborate charcter arrays that were printed on the side of the keys to make ascii art slide shows (animated :p)
It was in 1998 that i got my self a 'real' computer a pentium 200Mhz with 48mb ram during my first stint at TAFE doing the CertIII in IT. After discovering Quake2, i was totally amazed at the 3d world possibilities on a personal computer and when i first saw Half-Life i was hooked started mapping for it and while learning VB at TAFE i wrote my first released tool for half-life (PlayListEd).
My interest in games took up most of my time during the Tafe course and i finally got a portfolio together that was good enough to get me a scholarship at QANTM in 2002. There i learned C++, STL and DirectX and i have been programming games ever since. Why?, because i grew up on games and my curiosity as to how they are done never let go :)
heh, I was the calculator king in high-school, I built the link cable for my TI-83 and so I had all the games which got spread around. I also modded my calc, it has a built in little speaker :) Which isn't good when trying to play linked games :(
I also learnt some Z80 assembly too, Z80 is teh rox0r
lava_monkey: is it RPN?
My uncle programmed with punch cards when he was at uni, back in the 70' or something. He said it was a real bitch debugging...you had to line up for about an hour to get access to the machine, then if one of your cards was wrong, you had to fix it and line up all over again!
I did a tiny bit of programming in Hex at uni...programming (emulated)IC's for digital technology class or something :P
CYer, Blitz
quote:Originally posted by Souri
It's interesting to read how you all started out. Seems a lot of you had tried QBasic first. Zaph, you programmed in Hex? Holy crap! *waits for someone to chime in that they wrote programs in binary or on punch cards!*.. debugging must've been a bit of a challenge.
Yep - and I've still got the computer - I'll see if I can dig it up and post a picture to it - don't think it works any more though (too much dust and crap over the last 20 years)
I actually used punched-tape when doing Work Experience for GE back in '82 - and mark-sense cards at High School (never had to use punch-cards though)
I vaguely remember dabbling with C64 code way back, before I was old enough to know what I was doing, I do remember always wondering why the books had '10, 20, 30' instead of 1,2,3. Then about 4 years ago my friend started doing 'computer programming'. I thought that sounded fun (I was addicted to computers by then already), and left school and off I went. A few weeks in pascal, then I found C/C++ and I was smitten ;)
I've pretty much been at the compiler every day since then, after I plotted my first pixel the games just started rolling out, and here I am now about to finish my course and try and get into the industry.
yay!
Like a few other folks here, I was first turned on by those 30-games-in-one BASIC books for the C64. I was something like 7 at the time. Years later, once I was old enough to understand what a programming language was, I tried hacking around in GW-BASIC on my old 286.
A little time after that (about around 1993), I was introduced to Pascal, the demoscene, c/c++ and x86 assembler all within the span of about 2 years. I scrapped my old GW-BASIC programs an quickly evolved my style from crummy text-mode projects to c++ using assembler graphics routines in 256 colors. (which was almost a necessity to do anything since that 286 topped out at 12Mhz)
College opened my eyes to the internet, and what it was capapble of. So my horizons were further broadened by backend MUSH programming/hacking, HTML and Javascript. Going into the workforce during the dot-com boom thereafter granted me further skills with ASP, PHP, PL/SQL.. and throw in a little COM for futher measure.
I got into programming at first becuase of my love for videogames. That interest has expanded to include a genuine love of how systems are designed and implemented. I look at programming as a creative process, not merely a mathematical or engineering exercise; and so I consider myself an artist of sorts.
I love what I do.
I got my first computer when I was nearly 7, having seen some stuff running on the Microbees back in primary school and thinking "hmmmm.... that looks more interesting than the TV" (in glorious light-orange on dark-orange monochrome) :)
My first machine was a C16, I got it for christmas but then we couldn't find any games to play on it and didn't figure out how to load any of the ones that came with it. So eventually my parents took it back to the store (Grace Bros :) and got a C64 instead. Oyeah! I started programming on it soon after because it came with some books and I liked the idea of making my own games. I spent many afternoons of my childhood reading computer magazines and copying programs from them.
The C64 BASIC was pretty bad and I couldn't do much with it. I didn't have an assembler but found out about Simon's BASIC which r0x0red. That kept me happy until I got my Amiga in 1990. That was really cool - the graphics and sounds were awesome. I did a little AmigaBASIC but not much and spent alot of time just playing games until I got AMOS. The biggest thing I tried to code in that was an adventure game engine (I was in year 9 by then) inspired by the Sierra games like Leisure Suit Larry. I still have copies of all the old stuff on my HDD. By then I was also using a PC laptop in school (an 8088 with no hard disk and only battery-backed up himem as a sort of non-volatile RAM disk). I did a little GWBASIC but soon found my language of choice for the next few years - Turbo Pascal. Did a few little games in that, including a text mode space invaders.
Then I did Java and VB and the other languages they made us do at uni, liked Java and did that for awhile. Now I'm at the AIE and firmly settled on C++/DirectX for now.
Before AIE I was doing Ada at my old job.... but I'd rather forget that thanks :)
I started programming on an Apple ][+ with 48K RAM and a TAPE drive. I learned BASIC first but it wasn't good enough to write games, which was my main purpose to learn programming, so I turned to Assembly Language. I had to enter machine code (hex numbers) directly just like what Zaph did. In fact I wrote a mini Assembler myself in order to enter 6502 mnemonics later on. I did this kind of low level programming for few months before getting a disk drive and 16K RAM card and a real Assembler called Lisa. These days probably not too many people know how to use "debug" in a Windows' command prompt [;)]
It's really fascinating to look back the good old days and see how technology has advanced over the years.
Well, seeing that bunch of lads having started with a good old Commodore, here is my path...
Started with a C64 also, it was ... hmmmm ... Christmas 84 !!! What, 19 years ??? [:0]
Did a little bit of Basic (mostly poke and peek) when I was not playing (which was pretty rare). My biggest project was a very nice Sprite Editor [8D]. Played with 6502 assembler, but never did something of importance.
Then on the Amiga, only gaming, no programming.
At university, bought a 486 (awfully expensive) and learnt myself C and wrote a Tetris on DOS.
After that, I landed a programming job in the finance industry [V] and learnt C++. That was ten years ago and since I have developed on Solaris, then Mac and Windows for the last six years. Started a bit of Java as well. But because finance is so boring and it's impossible to switch to video game industry now, I started last year development in C/C++ (and maybe assembly soon) on the GBA. What a pleasure to write games (even small ones) !
I was mighty taken with the graphics power of my friends Apple II, and was quite pleased when I got my spiffy new 386 (20mb HDD!!) when I was ~7. When I got it out of the box and turned it on, it booted to dosshell. I didn't know what to do from there, so I mashed keys until something happened... browsing c:dos I found gorillas.bas and thought gorillas sounded cool, so I ran that. That opened the qBasic (yay!) code to gorillas, and after I had played that I wondered what all the code stuff was.
I got hooked making silly little games so I saved my pocket money and bought Turbo Pascal (The doc from mission to mars said it was made in pascal!) and then onto Turbo C.
Since my pc wasn't capable of running any kind of windows or any drawing program, I drew things with code commands. That skill helped me make my first quake 1 map in notepad, and I started modding for quake 1. Since then I've sworn a solemn oath to waste my life making games. [:)]
Scott.