117 replies to this topic

[Wingfat]

Punch Cards. nice.. I have worked on IBM AS400s a lot back in the day, the giant whole room Computer that was reel to reel.

[JDN]

AutoCoder - my very first language - similar to Assembly language - but it was produced before any Assembly Language compilers that I know.

Assembly Language - there were many problems with AutoCoder. The biggest problem was that it often failed to work.
So IBM developed Assembly Language because it was far more efficient to code than Machine Lanugage - which was the very first language ever used on computers. It can't get any more basic than Machine Language.

Fortran - it was a good language considering it was the first serious try. But compared to modern languages, it is just a kind of joke. Still, it was good to write formulas and have them evaluated. After all, its name means "Formula Translator"

PL/I - Programming Language One - an excellent langage produced by IBM who intended it would be the one and only language anyone would ever need.
It was a total bust. Hardly anyone ever used it.

Snoball - an amazing language - developed by Bell Labs. Very interesting language. It was a language best used to manipulate text strings.

Most interesting language I ever learned. Nicest language too - in many ways.

<!-- m -->http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL<!-- m -->

Unfortunately, Snoball was a translator - not a compiler and that meant it was not very efficient and it could easily take five to ten times longer to run a program in Snoball than it would in an programming language like Fortran or PL/I. A translator remains resident while running a program and "oversees" its execution. So it takes much longer because it's actually one language managing a second language. I sure wish I had a working version of Snoball today. Just to use when I occasionally need to manipulate some text.

Cobol - but I never learned very much. I always thought it was a really stupid language. It was developed using the philosphy that some people preferred to write programs in an English language structure. So you would write statements like, "Move Spaces to Final-Balance-Summary." An incredibly assinine language IMO. But many people love it because it is the only language they ever learned.


APL - a great language. But once again - a Translator (aka Interpreter) and not a compiler. So it is very inefficient and was never intended for doing large processing jobs.

Pascal - perhaps my favorite language for use with PCs. I can create a Pascal program with less lines and in less time than any other language I use on the PC. AHK is not really a programming language in the same sense as other programming language. There is nothing better for sitting between the keyboard and the CPU and being triggered by keyboard events. I don't think that necessarily makes it less efficient than a language like Pascal.

C - a great language when you need to do something as efficiently as possible. But very difficul

[LARK2355]

This brings back memories.
first computer uk101 total memory 4k and we used to record programs on a audio cassette after that sinclair ql (we networked those) first job programming was on IBM system 34,then 36 then 38 then AS400 now retired so just for fun now ahk

[Wingfat]

This brings back memories.
first computer uk101 total memory 4k and we used to record programs on a audio cassette after that sinclair ql (we networked those) first job programming was on IBM system 34,then 36 then 38 then AS400 now retired so just for fun now ahk

nice.. i remember taking down AS400s for the Cal Nursues Acc. seeing their faces when you showed them the new size of the PCs that were going to take over for those huge tape reel to reel machines.

[LARK2355]

what about the big air conditioned (or water cooled) rooms with room for stack of tapes and now a small black box sitting in the corner.
ps i still type sndmsg instead of msgbox

[Wingfat]

80s Movie time.. D.A.R.Y.L.
an acronym for "Data-Analysing Robot Youth Lifeform"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088979/
A young boy is found wandering without any memory of who he is. A family takes him in and begin to look for clues to help him find his way home. In the meantime, they notice that the boy seems to have certain special abilities, not usually found in kids his age, or even fully-grown adults.

[hafizimran]

Excel VBA

[Daniel Bonnell]

(Extended) B.A.S.I.C. on an old TI-994/A.  Ran at 4MHz - woo hoo.  And I had the 16K memory upgrade, too.  I was in elementary school and wrote a small word processor program that was stored on an audio cassette.  LOL

[side]

greek fail version of basic

ahk

C++

visual C#

javascript

[triola]

As best I can recall:
1983 CBM Basic
1985 GW Basic
1986 x86 ASM
1988 QuickC
1991 Watcom C
1993 VC/C++ 1.0
1995 HTML
1996 javascript
1996 Perl
1998 lisp
2003 php
My 'goto' language is C/C++ (VC or gcc) for just about everything.
I'm not a 'real' programmer, just a hobbiest.
 

[JMeneses]

I start (1973 spain) from a IBM/360/20 operator with punch cards, card sorting, reading, I think remember that the disks had no arms moving back and processes were matchings. After a IBM/370 and greater Language COBOL, RPGII and PL/1 CICS and Job Control(JCL),

I am currently with NATURAL/ADABAS (HOST BS2000) and know VB and of course my favorite AHK though not as much as I would like Windows APIs

Thank you all for your POSTS and thanks Google Translaitor

[Cruncher1]

1st was BASIC on our TI-99/4A with 16K of RAM http://oldcomputers.net/ti994a.html Not much fun. Never got far.

2nd was COBOL. Not much fun.  Never got far. Don't remember any of it.

3rd was HTML/PHP. Designed my first website in 1995-ish. Now we are getting somewhere!

4th was Visual Basic. Very useful. Very worthwhile learning. But... it's Microsoft.   

5th was AHK. Truly Fun language, probably my favorite.

Next is Python. We'll see how that goes. So far it's OK.

[rEX]

1st lang was HTML on pentium single core, 256 MB Ram, 20GB HDD

[consultjohan]

FORTRAN 77, 1977 using punch cards

BASIC on SHARP PC1211, then on ZX Spectrum 48K, then Simons Basic on Commodore 64

APL on IBM

Turbo Pascal (loved it)

DeSmet C on IBM PC (Marc de Smet's C RIP?)

Clipper (compiler for DBase)

CSP on IBM 9370

REXX on VM/CMS on IBM

Foxpro on Windows for Workgroups & MSSQL

Visual Basic 6

Oracle DBA/triggers & shit

ASP/HTML/CSS intranet

COBOL on AS/400

VB & C# .NET

PHP, JavaScript (lots of it)

AHK (works for me)

 

Now I do photography & Photoshop. See my photos on http://www.fluidr.co...os/consultjohan

 

Thanks Lexikos. You've done a fantastic job!

[robert_ilbrink]

<p>Basic via teletype at school</p>
<p>Fortran with punch cards at school</p>
<p>Front panel toggle switches to enter memory address and instruction plus data then push store button, then select next address and so on...at Raytheon, but also used one of the first &quot;personal desktop&quot; computers at Raytheon. It looked similar to this one:</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><img alt="" src="http://www.old-compu...oint-2200_1.jpg" style="width: 383px; height: 292px;" /></p>