What is your first coding memory?

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What is your first coding memory?

For me, it’s either

  1. My computer course where we had to use HTML and CSS to create different coloured boxes and text on a web page. Looking back I wonder how it took me so long but it was my first ever time seeing anything like that so the learning curve was steep.
  2. Trying to figure out for and while loops in Java during the first few months of my degree. There were extra classes 3 days per week to help us understand this.
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Hobby computer club in the early/mid 80s on a Sunday morning, organised by a local youth club.
Everyone brought their own home computer, and programmed in Basic. Curiosity (and a bit of envy) what could be done with the different machines everyone brought. I had an Acorn Electron. Other machines that where there that I can remember: ZX Spectrum, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 16.

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A row of 5 or 6 ZX Spectrum machines in the school media center almost put me off computers, they ran a lunch club teaching you to do things in turtle logo. 2-odd years later I bought my own computer and taught myself enough x86/186 to write a TSR menu system that consumed < 256 bytes of RAM.

I still recall the 386 and “pentium” instructions coming along and starting to really get lost in there. That self-directed learning indirectly got me my first job.

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Gosh first memory good question.
I remember 2 things from loooong ago but I’m not sure which one came first anymore:

  • I was a Wiki Editor for a video game and I remade the whole style of the website.
  • Made my very first video game (in Ruby)

This question makes me feel old … . Thanks @heather_reid !! :slight_smile:

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While not really a coding memory. The first time I used a command line to do something rather the the UI blew my mind. Felt like I was in the Matrix or something.

Still love using the command line to this day. It’s my go to for things like Git, where I’ve not used the UI at all.

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Has to be the infamous:

10: Print “Hello!”
20: Goto 10

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I remember learning VB in A-Level Computing and devloping a registration and allocation of duties programme for my local Air Cadet unit. Was really proud of it at the time…

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Hello World on a ZX Spectrum I’d been bought for Christmas.

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On my ZX Spectrum 128k +2 I would write out code from gaming magazines. These were either games in their own right, or pokes/cheats for other games. They were written in Basic. I was probably about 8/9 years old at the time.

I would then save them to a tape, so they could be loaded up when I needed them. I often wouldn’t know if anything was working until I ran them, as there was no debugging or linting, or other tools to indicate a problem in the code.

This became easier when I started learning AmigaBasic, which had a proper IDE. I used an Amiga, and sometimes an Acorn Electron throughout the late 80’s to mid 90’s which was when I first got regular access to PC’s at college and University.

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My 8th grade Algebra teacher asked if anyone was interested in learning more about computer programming. A bunch of us met after school and she introduced us to FORTRAN.
A week or so later, we met at the high school where they had a terminal (that is, a keyboard and printer) connected to a computer somewhere. It was so cool to type in the program and have it run. We never seemed to get enough time on the terminal but I credit her with sparking my interest and career in IT.

Joe

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Messing about in BASIC on a ZX Spectrum at home, or a BBC Micro at school - we had to write a program on the latter for our “O” level computer studies course, which really shows my age now! One memorable thing from computer studies was the way our teacher got us to understand how a computer could go wrong if you haven’t given it precise instructions. He told us to write out a set of step-by-step instructions for making a cup of tea, and then went through each one pointing out anywhere where there was a missing instruction or ambiguity. I recall my effort was the nearest to being bug-free, at two pages long, but failed on my step about filling the kettle as I’d said to fill the kettle with water to the halfway mark, but hadn’t said whether the water should be inside or outside!

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Back in my student days in the middle 1970s, the computing modules of our Librarianship course consisted of two things:

  • Writing data search and retrieval programs in PL/1 on a hard copy coding form that were then transferred to 80-column punch cards so they could be run overnight on the University of Michigan mainframe (which was almost in real time, given the time difference between Newcastle upon Tyne [UK] and Michigan); and
  • Writing simple programs in Basic (before it was Visual!) on the Polytechnic’s Nova mini-computer, which existed only for the purpose of letting around 20 students at a time try stuff on it. No video terminals in those days; instead, we used ASR33 teletypes, chunky machines whose keyboards had spring-loaded keys which needed to be depressed two-thirds of their throw before the solenoid they were attached to fired and printed the selected symbol. Needless to say, you couldn’t actually touch-type on them, but they were never designed for that anyway.
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Does writing (and re-writing and re-writing) of config.sys/autoexec.bat under DOS 5 count (so that Civilization would run)?
Otherwise fiddling around with html for my company back in the 90s. The result looked grotesque.

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Copying the code for a game of Blackjack out of a computer magazine onto my Amstrad 464 (With green screen).I made a mistake because it used to go up to 24 instead of 21, but it was still awesome.

I kept my computer on for three days because I didn’t want to lose all that code, I had nothing to save it to so it eventually got lost.

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I tried to learn Java in 2014 by watching some YouTube tutorials, that made me have nightmares about programming for the next couple of years! :joy:

But, I manged to overcome those paralyzing fears - I’ve done some development work and at the time being I’m doing API automation in Java and the language makes a lot of sense to me today! :nerd_face:

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I know I’d written in BASIC on a ZX81 and ZX Spectrum before this, but I don’t remember any of that. The first thing I remember was writing a thing that was meant to be part of a game I never wrote, that let you pick your initials. It had the alphabet on the screen, and you used keys to move and select. It was my first proper thing in Z80 assembler, and it took me a while to realise that the problem was that my code was too fast - the cursor moved several letters across before the screen had chance to refresh.

It was my first feeling of having loads of power to play with in a computer. Looking back now, it was tiny - 48K RAM, 3.5MHz chip etc. At the time it was a power house.

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