Age yourself with....

DarkoT said:

My first step into comp world was Commodore 64 and GwBasic. In PC world I was involved into Asembler programming, after that I switched to Borland C. After that we start to using in company Microsoft Visual .net. Before 3 Years I was forced to cover Linux machines with small app and here I am. And this was one of my best desition to start using different programming IDE... Love B4X

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Similar to my first steps but with the ZX-81 and ZX-Spectrum. I learnt Z80A Assembly on those then GWBasic on the PC before having my eyes well and truly opened with Borland C. After all my work in the medical field I would probably have stopped programming for good but one afternoon I came across B4A and downloaded the month trial. Instantly hooked!

John Naylor said:

my eyes well and truly opened with Borland C

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Ditto. I'd been writing a terminal program for Viatel (= au version of gb Prestel) with Turbo BASIC, but the serial functions didn't cope well with errors, so when I heard Borland was releasing a C compiler, I was out banging on the distributor's door here to get it.

I've got the Turbo Pascal manual somewhere too (I think with the front cover cut off because that's what you had to do to get subsequent versions at discounted price - or maybe that was for changing from CP/M version to PC version).

Ignore the VAX BASIC booklet. ?

i started coding in 2006. it was vba on excel. i was fascinated how easy it was to create a working application. after few weeks i found vb2005 and started creating some small apps until i created a very nice application for Optometrists. it was called Sagital 2009. it was an app that performs very complex calculations for the thickness of a lens according to its Optical prescription.

i sold 1 copy to a costumer in NY that sent me the money via paypal. it was 100$. it was my first sell and also the only copy of sagital 2009 i sold ?
i called the app sagital because sagital is a part of the eye and it sounds nice. since than my company is called sagital.

here is the app:

I bought Borland Turbo C 2.0 in 1988 and it cost me 0.60 euros (at the current exchange rate).
I was amazed, I was programming with it until 1998, when I started using Delphi.

By the way, there is a similar thread to this one, with the difference that this one asks for "the first time you got PAID for a job".

vecino said:

I bought Borland Turbo C 2.0 in 1988 and it cost me 0.60 euros (at the current exchange rate).

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Heck, that's an astonishingly good price. Turbo Pascal was like AUD 40 here, and I remember Turbo BASIC being AUD 99 and Turbo C being around AUD 150 (fair enough, because it was like 6x as many disks, and I think included assembler and debugger too).

John Naylor said:

Similar to my first steps but with the ZX-81 and ZX-Spectrum. I learnt Z80A Assembly on those then GWBasic on the PC before having my eyes well and truly opened with Borland C. After all my work in the medical field I would probably have stopped programming for good but one afternoon I came across B4A and downloaded the month trial. Instantly hooked!

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Have you worked with Clipper? This was another story...

emexes said:

Heck, that's an astonishingly good price. Turbo Pascal was like AUD 40 here, and I remember Turbo BASIC being AUD 99 and Turbo C being around AUD 150 (fair enough, because it was like 6x as many disks, and I think included assembler and debugger too).

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It was a very special price because I had a computer business and bought a large number of licenses.

John Naylor started this thread to see if he is the oldest coder - having written the navigation system for Noahs Ark. John, no bragging rights there mate, it only had to float ?

My first activity where I get paid was in a small sales office for servodrives. This was in 1988. There was a Macintosh running Excel. I had start writing Excel macros. Data was on floppies.

As Macintosh was expensive we got additionally a PC with MS-Dos and Windows 2.x. I had then to migrate the Excel scripts from Macintosh to Windows. My first "crossplatform" project ? This was a pain in the ass. We had a lot of problems with paths, file names, umlaut, etc.

In sum it was funny and very interesting. I am thankful I had the possibility to do this. It was the start of my working career in the IT industry.

My first dabble into programming was VB6 in high school.. then in college, i got stuck in VB6 class once again, as they had not moved to VB.Net yet. So as you can imagine, VB6 is what i ended up sticking to for many years after that.

As a hobby, was getting into 6805 assembly, and eventually AVR assembly, plus VB6/VBScript for writing quick little tools/scripts/utilties to do things with hardware or to convert things from one form to another. Something you would probably just use Python for today.

Fun times

techknight said:

My first dabble into programming was VB6 in high school.. then in college, i got stuck in VB6 class once again, as they had not moved to VB.Net yet. So as you can imagine, VB6 is what i ended up sticking to for many years after that.

As a hobby, was getting into 6805 assembly, and eventually AVR assembly, plus VB6/VBScript for writing quick little tools/scripts/utilties to do things with hardware or to convert things from one form to another. Something you would probably just use Python for today.

Fun times

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These are interesting days in the VB6 world actually, a true up to date successor may be just around the corner.

I started my computer programming adventure with a spectrum sinclair 48k. On it I've learned the basic language and after a while I discovered the fantastic combination between basic and assembler (randomize usr... ) - that was a really nice time, which today I still remember !
Then came the pc boom.. 286, 386, 486.. you name it.

I then started to work by Telesoft ( a "sister-company" of Telecom Italia ). A nice project was coding "robots" which should navigate in a 3270 mainframe application, to do some repetitive tasks. The script used was called "GoScript". It was coded in C but the script looked like basic. It was quite powerful. Sockets were used to communicate between the robots and the "dispatcher", which gave each free robot a task to perform.
The results were shown on a html page. Pretty cute technology for that time - well, at least in Italy (1992).

Another nice project I remember was programming a game. I was in this case a freelancer for a company in UK. I've coded a remake of the game "Iridis Alpha", originally made from Jeff Minter. The language I used was Blitz3D (still avaliable today, and free). The game went well and Jeff was quite impressed by my remake

j_o_h_n said:

These are interesting days in the VB6 world actually, a true up to date successor may be just around the corner.

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There was. it was called B4X and thats why i use it. haha.

I used Xojo/RealBASIC but its kinda clunky so i quit.

I feel like I might be one of the younger ones here though. the 8-bit world of computing, early BASIC like applesoft, QBASIC, etc was all before my time.

I started programming in assembler on a Science of Cambridge MK14 in 1979. From there to a ZX80 and ZX81. Probably first paid job when I worked for Mitel Telecom in Wales in the mid 80's, I wrote test programs for AC15 and E&M tie line modules that were part of the SX50 PBX. All in 6809 assembler..
Then onto a protocol converter to translate from German E&M to English E&M for an analogue tie line that ran as part of a digital tie line that Intel had bought between Munich and Swindon. Again in assembler on an 8048 processor. The exchanges wouldn't communicate as the implementation of the protocol was substantially different - oh for standards!

techknight said:

There was. it was called B4X and thats why i use it. haha.

I used Xojo/RealBASIC but its kinda clunky so i quit.

I feel like I might be one of the younger ones here though. the 8-bit world of computing, early BASIC like applesoft, QBASIC, etc was all before my time.

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B4X is a truly wonderful developement tool and I rely on it every day.
But I also have a lot of production in vb6
The software that I'm talking about allows you to open existing vb6 projects in its environment (twinbasic).
If Erel and Wayne could somehow get together then I think I'd be like a dog with two tails.

j_o_h_n said:

B4X is a truly wonderful developement tool and I rely on it every day.
But I also have a lot of production in vb6
The software that I'm talking about allows you to open existing vb6 projects in its environment (twinbasic).
If Erel and Wayne could somehow get together then I think I'd be like a dog with two tails.

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B4X is compiling to Java... is total different thing... but it uses BASIC language synthx (that all we love)...
vb6 may be still working but is dead... will never be alive again...

I think if you give your time 100% at B4X... you will be a winner !
* I was using vb6... a lot... i.. switched all my projects.. (not all.. but a 90%...) at B4X... i give 99.9% at b4x and I feel much better and safer than ever... the support to this language is extremely GOOD !

Mid eighties - BI (before Internet) wrote a program that would draw an American flag on your screen. Sold it on Compuserve. They sent me a check for $2.27. I didn't cash the check, I framed it and hung above my monitor.
I still have it. ?