How I started programming

Re:How I started programming by danso on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @02:41AM (#13865536)

I played with QBasic when I was young but never got into "real" programming until college, I wonder if I'd be more than a mediocre programmer today had I been exposed to assembly, which I ended up liking as a class but never did for fun.

But computer games as a gateway drug to programming is familiar. I had no idea what the hell EMS (Expanded Memory System) and XMS (Extended Memory System) were. But I managed to get Ultima VII and its apparently bizarre memory manager [0] to work on my computer. I now realize I was clueless about how the Windows OS worked, or basic principles of the command-line, but at least I wasn't afraid of it. Or with editing random INI files. Experimenting with INI files and booting into DOS was the only way to get U7 to run on Windows 95 systems.

[0] http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Voodoo_Memory_Manager

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Re:How I started programming by stevekemp on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @03:19AM (#13865672)

I had a huge gap, between playing with the Spectrum in the early eighties to using a PC for the first time around 1992.

I remember using QBasic, and using debug.com to write simple assembly programs - the most memorable one was a simple utility to "undelete" files from MS-DOS, which just involved modifying the FAT.

Most of my memories of the early PC-days were reading Ralph Brown's interrupt list and looking at the source code of viruses, via magazines such as 40HEX.

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