Poll: Which 8-bit computer got you into programming | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Which 8-bit computer got you into programming

28 pointsshawndumas28 comments

I want to apologize up front for missing your 8-bit computer.

Please vote for the Poll as well as your computer.

31 years ago, almost to the day (it was the last day of school), my father brought home an Apple IIe with two disk drives, a monochrome monitor, and 128 kilobytes of RAM. It came with two floppy disks, "System Master" and "Sample Programs", and several spiral-bound books: Applesoft Tutorial, the DOS Manual, Reference Manual. I was eleven years old.

I plugged the computer in, put a disk in the drive, turned it on. It beeped, whirred for a while, and a flashing cursor appeared. "Now what?" I wondered. I typed a few words and pushed Return. "?SYNTAX ERROR", it said.

I cracked open the "Applesoft Tutorial", which was in English -- not my mother tongue -- , and proceeded to type in the first program I saw. And then:

  ]RUN
  HELLO. WHAT'S YOUR NAME? APRICOT
  NICE TO MEET YOU, APRICOT.
  YOUR NAME REVERSED IS TOCIRPA.
  ]

I was hooked. I spend the following weeks teaching myself enough English to be able to understand the manual, and learned BASIC by typing stuff it and seeing what it did. Then my parents gave me a subscription to Nibble, a magazine that had an interesting mix of technical articles, product reviews, and many programs to type in. I learned a lot from reading those programs. When summer ended and I went to junior high, I met with older kids who had a better command of programming and eventually graduated to 6502 assembly language, and even did a bit of hardware hacking, thanks to a wonderful book called "The Apple II Circuit Description".

Commodore VIC-20, I was in a "gifted" program in the 2nd grade. Every Wednesday I was taken out of the normal class and put on a bus, where all the other smart kids from different schools were taken to a special school. Our teacher was writing one of those text based adventures. He taught us how to write loops, conditionals, printing output, gathering input, arrays. I have to say I was immediately hooked. Soon after my parents bought a TI-994A, I would spend hours typing in code from those old magazines that had simple game programs in them. I lusted for years for a commodore 64, my friends had them though they had no interest in programming them. It wasn't until 1990 that I got a real computer a Hewlett Packard 286. It wasn't until 1992 that I got a real compiler, borland turbo c++. I had no help, no internet, just one book. And I was on my way...

I'm the other VIC-20 vote so far and I don't know where my family had gotten that computer. It came with a book of BASIC programs that you could type in but we didn't have have a storage unit (tape drive), so each time I wanted to play a game I had to type the entire program in and run it. Most of the time I asked my mom to type it in for me, but I remember a couple of times that I spent the hour hunting and pecking in order to play my favorite game (Moon Rover or something, I forget the name).

Fun times!

I used to do that too! On a Spectrum, I had to type in the program, but I didn't even know how to read, so I just matched the symbols on paper with the symbols on the keyboard and tried to get the same output on the TV. Can't remember the games though.

None of the above. After studying McCracken's Fortran book, and Weiss's Lisp 1.5 Primer, I was finally introduced to a real computer: a Honeywell H-200 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_200 where I coded in Fortran, Cobol and QueasyOdor (um, "EasyCoder"). That was in 1969 kids.

(Oh yeah - and get off my lawn.)

TI-99 fans subthread here!

Pleasantly surprised to see my favorite here and with several upvotes. It always gets overlooked in comparison to the Commodores, Apples, Ataris, and the various UK favorites. but the TI-99 was where I typed in plenty of BASIC programs from library magazines and books... almost all of which failed horribly, being written for machines other than TI's odd BASIC dialect.

But once I figured out CALL COLOR, the screen would be a beautiful mess of colored characters anytime you saw me at the machine.

Ah, I miss my TI-99

> YOU SMELL A WUMPUS!

I voted twice. Don't kill me.

In second grade, my teacher wheeled in the school's only Apple II computer to show off a program she wrote at night school. It showed a text-mode picture of R2D2 and played the opening notes of the Star Wars theme. I wanted to know how to do cool things like that. It became an obsession.

I got a Commodore 64 in third grade, and learned BASIC and a little bit of assembly on it. That lasted me until my first year of high school. As you can guess from my username, I'm still a big fan.

My first computer was really "BASIC Computer Games" by Creative Computing. I spent a lot of time poring over those programs and hunt-and-pecking them on a TRS-80 at the local Radio Shack. Eventually my dad bought me a TRS-80 Model I from a old guy with a one-eyed cat. The Model I's poor RF shielding interfered with my dad's ham radio reception. He was a real good sport about it, though, and it was probably a factor in him getting me a Commodore 64 when that came out.

None of them. Mine was a 24 bit mainframe (Elliott 4130) in 1967, where my job was debugging them so I had to learn to code. In ASM. On paper tape. In the snow backwards uphill both ways etc etc etc.

On going uphill both ways - my first 8 bit was one I designed and wrote the assembler for myself. 1973.

I started with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_9850_series (Z80 like 8 bit core) (not in the poll!)

I started with a Z80 too, in the TI-86.

Z80; TI-83, what up.

My grandfather took me to K-mart when I was 10, and they had a VIC-20 on display. I sat down and read the manual that described BASIC. That's right, I learned to program at a K-mart.

For me and I guess for a lot of Brazilians, it was a HotBit MSX - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotbit

Puh, we had one NAND gate carved from wood and some delay lines crafted from buffalo guts. With some early work in quantum annealing, we calculated the name of God to 50 places.

Hmm... I learned on a 12-bit (PDP-8/E). The first 8-bit I worked with was a Kaypro-II. Focal and assembly on the former, S-Basic on the latter.

I learned FOCAL on a PDP-8/L, the first computer I'd ever seen that didn't fill a basement. Fun little language, where arrays were undeclared and sparse. I think every array element you wrote to probably created a symbol table entry. Sure did take a long time to load FOCAL's paper tape on an ASR/33. Maybe a load would fail 20% of the time and you'd have to reload. Ah, the glory days.

I am 32 and got my start on the built-in BASIC on the IBM PS/2. You don't have the original IBM, but you have the clones?

16 bit: Atari ST. Yes the Amiga is better in every other way but WE HAVE MIDI SO WE WIN. *

* I have never, ever, used MIDI.

whoever put in amstrad.... wow... I was not even expecting it here :-)

Amstrad CPC 464, Amstrad 6128 etc... :) Feeling old :)

I started with Oric 1 Atmos (not in the poll!).

Kim-1, all souped up with cassette interface

None, Mine was the superboard II

Canon X-07

added and voted for

Muh 486DX66 running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with QBasic.

Muh Nibbles! Muh Gorillas!

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