Tag: How did I get Started in Software Development

Uncle Bob — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 05:09:40 -0500

Micah tagged me with this “chain-blog”. I’ve enjoyed reading other peoples’ stories. You can read them too by just following the chain back to the start. (It’s a shame there’s no good way to do the forward links!)

Here’s my story.

How old were you when you started programming.

6th grade. That would have made me 11, so 1963. My mother bought me a little plastic computer named Digi-Comp I. This device contained 3 flip-flops and 6 “AND” gates that could be interconnected to create simile finite state automata. I played with it for weeks. I ordered the companion manual “How to write programs for Digi Comp I” which was a simple tutorial in boolean algebra. I inhaled it.

My freshman year in high school the math department was considering purchasing a simple electronic educational computer. It was called an ECP-18. It has 1024 15 bit words of drum memory. It had the coolest front panel. You programmed it in machine language by toggling in the instructions.

I learned to program it by listening to the salesperson has he entered in the diagnostic programs. He would mumble under his breath as he toggled them in. He’d punch in an octal 15 and mutter “store”, or an octal 12 and mutter “load”. Following the op-code he’d enter the memory address he was loading or storing. Fortunately I knew octal from my experience with Digi-Comp I. So I could follow along. After a while I started entering my own programs. Just simple things to compute 2x+4 or something like that. Fortunately for me I always put the constant zero at the end of each of my programs because I used it to clear the main register (the accumulator). I didn’t know it, but zero was the op-code for halt.

What was the first real program you wrote?

Mr. Patternson’s Computerized Gate. This was a simple little finite state automata that I designed for the Digi-Comp I. Mr. Patterson was a wise old man and people would line up to talk with him. His gate would admit only one person at a time. It detected when Mr. Patterson was free. Would open. When a new petitioner sat down the gate would close again.

Is that a “real” program? Were any of the ECP-18 snippets I put together “real”? I once saw a demo of someone typing BASIC into a GE timesharing computer. I didn’t know BASIC, but I inferred the structure and started writing programs in it. I was never able to execute any of them. My father bought me books on Fortran, Cobol, PL/1. I inhaled them all. I wrote lots of programs in those languages, but I had no computers to execute them on.

Probably the first “real” programs I wrote were for an Olivetti/Underwood Programma 101. It was a programmable calculator the size of a microwave oven. My father took me to a science teacher conference. They had one on display. They let me play with it. I wrote programs to solve pythagoras theorem, etc.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Egad! Fortran, Cobol, PL/1. BAL. PDP8 assembler, PDP11 assembler, 8080 assembler, Varian 620 assembler, GE Datanet 30 assembler, 6502 assembler, 68000 assembler, 8086 assembler, SNOBOL, LOGO, Smalltalk, Prolog, C, C++, Java, C#, Ruby, Forth, Postscript, Flex, etc. etc. etc. etc….

What was your first professional programming gig?

At the ripe old age of 16 I got a very temporary job writing Honeywell 200 assembler (which is a lot like 1401 assembler) for a actuarial firm named A.S.C. Tabulating.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Being a programmer is like being a doctor or a lawyer. You must never stop learning. Just as doctors will read medical journals, and lawyers keep up with legal decisions, programmers must keep up with new languages, operating systems, frameworks, etc. Learn, learn, learn.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had programming?

I can’t rank them. There are too many to count. I wrote a Lunar Lander game in Logo. I wrote a multi-tasking nucleus for an 8080 in C. Any time I went into a store with a C64 on display I’d type in a quick program to print / and \ randomly on the screen. I wrote an 8080 program in binary to control a set of relays to play “Mary had a little lamb”. The fun never stops!!!

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I didn’t know BASIC, but I inferred the structure and started writing programs in it. I was never able to execute any of them. My father bought me books on Fortran, Cobol, PL/1. I inhaled them all. I wrote lots of programs in those languages, but I had no computers to execute them on.

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It was a programmable calculator the size of a microwave oven. My father took me to a science teacher conference. They had one on display. They let me play with it. I wrote programs to solve pythagoras theorem, etc.

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