[Coco] Programming anniversaries (was Re: MAMOU bug?)

[Rich Carreiro]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 2:36 AM, Mark McDougall <msmcdoug at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> On 3/02/2013 2:23 PM, Stephen H. Fischer wrote:
>
>>> I hit an bit anniversary last month, 40 years since I wrote my first
>>> program. It was with punch cards too.
>
>
> I'm going to play this game too. 34 years for me. TRS-80 BASIC.
>
> I missed out on punched cards by 1 year at uni. Can't say that I'm
> disappointed in any way.

I wrote my first program in 1979 in Level 2 BASIC on a TRS-80 Model I,
so 34 years here.  Got my battleship grey 16K CoCo with extended BASIC
the year that was available, then moved up to a 64K CoCo 2 when it came
out and had lots of fun with it (wished I'd kept all my Chromasette issues...)
Used the CoCo all through junior high and high school and my freshman year
at MIT for writing papers, too (can't remember the program -- maybe
Telewriter? --
but it used the PMODE 4 mode to do 80 character per line on-screen formatting.
Not easy to look at but it got the job done.

Then got an Amiga 1000 in either Spring 1985 or 86 and stayed in the Amiga
family all the way to an A3000, but finally switched over to Linux on
x86 hardware
in 1995.

I *have* done punchcard programming.  In high school of all places.  After
doing Pascal on TRS-80 Model IIIs my junior year, I took FORTRAN my senior
year.  That was done using the mainframe in the basement of the school and
was FORTRAN-66 which was old even by 1985 standards.  And we had to do
it all on punchcards.  (And then for the final quarter of the year we had to do
COBOL.  Oh my god, what a horrid language...)

-- 
Rich Carreiro             rlcarr at gmail.com