Programming for me 1977-1983

[Ten_Mile_Hike]

          ***** Memories From 46 years ago*******

I am very thankful to have had programming as a hobby for almost half a century. I'm
not an expert and never will be. I know the basics and that is enough for me to enjoy
writing simple code and inventing new tricks to accomplish a task.

My first experience with "programming" was while in the USAF in 1977 when I had
to enter targeting information one byte at a time by pressing physical buttons "in octal"
and later using magnetic tape for the Minuteman ICBM, but this wasn't really
programming as I was given a printout of what values I had to enter and I didn't know
what these values actually did or how they did it.

Then I took introductory Basic and Pascal in college in 1982 using punch cards.

My first exposure to "home" programming was Atari Basic on an Atari 800 XL that
I bought around 1983. I still remember two commands (peek,poke). These
commands allowed you to read and to alter the value of ANY memory address in
the system IE "Poke 234,55" would set the memory position 234 to the value of
55. There was no memory protection at all. You could "directly" alter any memory
address without restriction including sound chips, graphics chips, hardware registers
and CPU registers. You could delete, duplicate or move the values of any memory
address to another address. Since these commands operated at direct machine
level they were also very fast.

Can you imagine having commands like this available today on Windows? With
unrestricted and unprotected memory what level of hell might a programmer
intentionally or accidentally cause?

If anyone feels like it please add your memories of how you started and the highlights
of your life as either a professional or a hobbyist programmer; I would love to read them.

[Blaazen]

My first experience with "programming" was while in the USAF in 1977 when I had
to enter targeting information one byte at a time by pressing physical buttons "in octal"
and later using magnetic tape for the Minuteman ICBM, but this wasn't really
programming as I was given a printout of what values I had to enter and I didn't know
what these values actually did or how they did it.

Apparently, you did your job well, since our world still exists. 

[MarkMLl]

Ten_Mile_Hike, thanks for your reminiscences. There are of course still platforms where you can unrestrictedly Peek() and Poke(), even if these days those operations are usually presented as pointer dereferences.

Leaving aside the retrocomputing fraternity, some of whom fancy large-scale systems which have their own memory access control, there's much good work being done on microcontrollers (Atmel/AVR/Arduino, ARM including RP2040, and latterly RISC-V) which feature an unprotected flat address space.

There's also hardy individuals exploring FPGAs, and whilst these aren't directly relevant to FPC it is entirely feasible to implement anything from a low-end AVR to a '486 or SPARC on a fairly low-cost chip, together with an emulation of special-purpose peripherals etc.

So, as one switch-flipper and former user of paper tape to another: enjoy :-)

MarkMLl