Average age of B4X programmers

BASIC has been around since 1964, a simplified FORTRAN II that borrowed heavily from ALGOL 60.

I'm 37, at last until october.
Reading the posts, i remember so clear as it was yesterday when my father surprised me with a 48 kg beast that a friend of him, bank employee, gave him when the bank renewed the systems... It was a 8088, with an MDA display, no graphics.
I remember the 5-1/4 disks, the huge 10 Mb HDD...
I remember the nights i spent in front of that uranium-like screen (actually i think is a miracle i'm not blind yet) modifying the gorilla.bas game to change the banana for a skull i designed with ASCII codes. This was the way i started, like some of you, with the ¿help? of books i take from the public library and trying to understand what the hell the writer is trying to say. I remember it was the day of the opening ceremony of the seoul olympics, so i was nine yet... 28 years ago... But there is one think that never changed, the hunger of knowledge, the inner spark that push you to try to understand and know how to do new things than appears.
Is very comfortable to check that a lot of you walked the same way, with some variants, but same essence.
Thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge, i'll try my best to share my little piece of it.
Cheers.

klaus said:

Well, I feel like a dinosaur here (70+) !

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Does that make you a Grandroid?

MikeH said:

Does that make you a Grandroid?

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Who knows ?

MikeH said:

Does that make you a Grandroid?

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Teach to others?

It amuses me that some young people seem to think that computers are something recent and only capable of being used and understood by their own generation. In fact they really know little about what computers are and how they work but only know how to use the programs provided for them by others.

People seem to forget that it was people around my age (69), and about 10 years before and after, that pioneered the use of computers in areas other than the narrow areas of scientific computing, driven in large part by the cold war. In 1968 I was working on military weapon simulators, huge tactical team training simulators with the actual military hardware inputs being driven in real time by Ferranti Argus minicomputers. My partner (76) and her then husband were working at Harwell using early IBM computers for nuclear modelling and research. That body of expertise went on to expand the use of computers in industry (in my case) and commerce (in her case). Computers have occupied me for my entire working life, continue to do so in my retirement, and will probably do so until the grey cells wear out.

Respect!

I am 46, so I have lived only a part of this evolution. And looking back, each early step impresses me so much more than now reading for instance that there is a new "peta-core" chip in the market
Only knowing from where we come can we realise how great all it is

I'm 36. I started out on an Amstrad CPC 64k computer in the mid 1980's. It had a tape deck attached to it and a green screen 14 inch monitor. I think it cost around £400 at the time.

I loved it and I even learnt some simple basic programming on it. then my Dad upgraded to a colour 6128 Amstrad computer, it had a disk drive, which was amazing at the time, the discs could hold 178k per side (yes they were two sided) and cost £2.50 each to buy blank ones.

We moved on later to the Amiga 500+ computer, tehn the Amiga 1200 (with an 80MB hard disk!). Finally after that I went to university with my 486 DX 33 PC and have been on PC's ever since.

Not it's all PC and Android in my life.

I am 28 and if i am here its thanks to Excel and macros. I had to do many reports in excel and after sometime I understood that excel could do the work for me and I would have more time to ... Do nothing,

Manual report = 4 hours.
Report with macros = 4 minutes

Create that macro = countless hours.

But well, at the end I could 9gag 7 of my 8 hours shift.

agraham said:

It amuses me that some young people seem to think that computers are something recent and only capable of being used and understood by their own generation. In fact they really know little about what computers are and how they work but only know how to use the programs provided for them by others.

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It's good to see you Andrew.

--- Jem

HotShoe said:

It's good to see you Andrew.

--- Jem

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My thoughts exactly!

Long time no see!

Good to see Andrew again in the forum.
You are right in that new generations see us we know little about computers, but in some areas they have point.. when it comes to the features
of facebook or hidden features of programs, including configuration, hiding, blocking... ect.. then they have the longer hand. My daughter now is
teaching my how to use Google and the secret string format and building that will bring perfects hits.

@Beja

My daughter now is teaching my how to use Google and the secret string format and building that will bring perfects hits.

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..and you will surely share that knowliedge with us ex-teen agers, won't you?