Hi all,
exactly 40 years ago I began my adventure in computing.
My father came home with an Olivetti M20 bought for his company but the programmer hired to write the needed software "disappeared" during the Summer so he was left wit a very costly "piece of plastic". Well, he came to my room, put the PC on my desk and told me: " see if you can do something with it".
I was in high school, never heard about programming, computing and that wonderful world before. Luckily I was strong in math and logic so in a short time I learned the embedded interpreter Basic (named Basic 8000 if I recall it correctly) and wrote a few simple programs.
I still have my M20 in my garage and from time to time I turn it on just to meet again an old friend.
Two years later, after a few sw written in GWBasic, my parents bought an Olivetti M24 and I met my love: the Pascal language.
At the beginning it was a three-disk compiler (editor, compiler, linker) by Microsoft but luckily (again) I was a reader of Byte magazine and I was hit by an advertisement showing a gold digger showing a product named TurboPascal by Borland. My life changed.
Now, while at home I could play with some good hardware and the best dev tool available, at the University I had to exercise on punch cards, Fortran 77 and occasional access to PDP-11 and VAX-750. We learned some C too and I recall an assignment where I had to write a bootloader in assembly for an EEPROM programmer ( I mostly derived it from the original bootcode for the IBM PC..shhhh, it's a secret..heheheh).
Well, this more or less covers the DOS-era. We were lucky. We saw the personal computing be born (and then die) and it there was a point in time we could say we knew everything about it. CPU and hardware, OS, drivers, whatever.
My interest was caught by AI (natural language recognition, in particular). So I started with Lisp (difficult) then found Prolog (easier). I achieved some basic results then I had to choose between research or business. I went for the latter (and still don't know whether it was a good choice..).
TurboPascal/Delphi took me to 2013 when my wife gave me as a gift an Android tablet. I had no idea what to do with it beyond reading online newspapers, so for some months it stayed quietly in a desk drawer.
Then, on a boring day, a generic search for something like "Android dev tools" let me find Anywhere Software's B4A. I soon realized it was the tool. I didn't even try the trial period. Bought it, installed it and followed some examples on the forum (and a lot or threads reading).
And here we are. Every few months @Erel gives us better and refined tools, contributors publish new libs and interesting stories about what they developed, questions make me learn something new every day..
So, after 40 years I can say that "Programming is still fun".
Thank you all and sorry for this too personal thread. It's a special day for me (and my M20 friend).
udg
exactly 40 years ago I began my adventure in computing.
My father came home with an Olivetti M20 bought for his company but the programmer hired to write the needed software "disappeared" during the Summer so he was left wit a very costly "piece of plastic". Well, he came to my room, put the PC on my desk and told me: " see if you can do something with it".
I was in high school, never heard about programming, computing and that wonderful world before. Luckily I was strong in math and logic so in a short time I learned the embedded interpreter Basic (named Basic 8000 if I recall it correctly) and wrote a few simple programs.
I still have my M20 in my garage and from time to time I turn it on just to meet again an old friend.
Two years later, after a few sw written in GWBasic, my parents bought an Olivetti M24 and I met my love: the Pascal language.
At the beginning it was a three-disk compiler (editor, compiler, linker) by Microsoft but luckily (again) I was a reader of Byte magazine and I was hit by an advertisement showing a gold digger showing a product named TurboPascal by Borland. My life changed.
Now, while at home I could play with some good hardware and the best dev tool available, at the University I had to exercise on punch cards, Fortran 77 and occasional access to PDP-11 and VAX-750. We learned some C too and I recall an assignment where I had to write a bootloader in assembly for an EEPROM programmer ( I mostly derived it from the original bootcode for the IBM PC..shhhh, it's a secret..heheheh).
Well, this more or less covers the DOS-era. We were lucky. We saw the personal computing be born (and then die) and it there was a point in time we could say we knew everything about it. CPU and hardware, OS, drivers, whatever.
My interest was caught by AI (natural language recognition, in particular). So I started with Lisp (difficult) then found Prolog (easier). I achieved some basic results then I had to choose between research or business. I went for the latter (and still don't know whether it was a good choice..).
TurboPascal/Delphi took me to 2013 when my wife gave me as a gift an Android tablet. I had no idea what to do with it beyond reading online newspapers, so for some months it stayed quietly in a desk drawer.
Then, on a boring day, a generic search for something like "Android dev tools" let me find Anywhere Software's B4A. I soon realized it was the tool. I didn't even try the trial period. Bought it, installed it and followed some examples on the forum (and a lot or threads reading).
And here we are. Every few months @Erel gives us better and refined tools, contributors publish new libs and interesting stories about what they developed, questions make me learn something new every day..
So, after 40 years I can say that "Programming is still fun".
Thank you all and sorry for this too personal thread. It's a special day for me (and my M20 friend).
udg
not on that deck-chair, but the scene you depicted is very close to what happened..heheh
