Your first program

What was your first program that you created by yourself?

Mine was a 'snowflake generator' on the ZX spectrum, in 1990. All it did was drew some lines in a circle. Amazingly, it even got published in the 'Program Pitstop' column in Your Sinclair magazine. Probably because I signed the letter "Yours sincerely, Chris (aged 11)".

sine wave fractal generator

A text adventure. Took me ages to write. I literally search the response for "Walk North"... etc for all different combinations of commands. Then i realised later about text parsing!

probably:

10 cls
20 print "lalala"
30 print "OMGWTFBBQ"
40 goto 40

Come on ppl, be fair: your first program wasn't a snowflake generator, a fractal generator or a text adventure.. :P

The first one I remember was a program that displayed a background image and then my name with a random location and color every few seconds on the screen.

After that, I was hooked.

10 cls
20 print at 10,10;"Hunky Chunky!"
30 pause 0
40 cls
50 print at 10,10;"Chunky Hunky!"
60 pause 0
70 goto 10

or something similar

Text adventure. It was crap.

text rpg based on a book i was writing called the quest for Excalibur...I was like 7 years old so it was crap.

On the Oric-1 with built-in speaker and sound effect commands,

10 Zap
20 Ping
30 Shoot
40 Explode
50 Goto 10

60...leave store as discreetly as possible.

probably a ten line type-in from amstrad action magazine.

Aside from the obvious "Hello World" kind of examples, I started off making text adventures and other text-mode games in the late 80's.

I remember one that was a text adventure called "The Quest of Sir Edwin" or something equally awful where you had to lead this knight to recover a magic item that would save the king. Another one was an absolutely terrible wrestling role-playing game (all in ANSI graphics) where you chose one of the 4 or 5 made up wrestlers and had them fight turn-based matches on their quest to win the belt. I even had an easter egg in that one where you could hit a particular key during character selection and be able to play as a secret character who had all the best moves of the other guys.

I used to share them with my friends, so there's probably some copies floating around somewhere on old 5 1/4" disks.

I did find a copy of one of my slightly later creations on the archive of some BBS. It was a DOS fortune telling program from around 1992. It can be found here - http://jhanson.com/software/fortuneteller.html

My first program was a really crappy pong game. It didn't work properly and I remember spending a month writing it. :)

My first serious try was '89 when wrote in GWBasic (or Basica?) using an Amstrad PC1512 a program to calculate the multiplication result of two matrices NxN. I never managed to test it on large matrices!

First finished program was some GUI for unpacking achieves written in AmigaE.

I reckon it might have been

10 print "Hello"
20 goto 10

cant recall the first program, but i did code a music player on the amiga that went into public domain. this player was the first good software i recall making.

Definately my first one.

Mine was an Fortran addition program on a VAX VMS around 1980 aged 12.

My first decent program was a DnD type game in gw-basic in about 1986. You could use the arrow keys to move him around and space bar to fire an arrow. No buffering so it flickered but man it was cool!!

My first proper program that I did myself (i.e. not 10 Print "Avon rocks!" : Goto 10) was probably "Guess the Number" on the ZX81.

Hee Hee. It was always a bit of cheeky fun to write something on the store PC's then make your escape:

10 Cls
20 Print "Please wait ..."
30 Pause 1000
40 Print " ** Don't buy me. I'm expensive **";
50 Goto 40

Electronic vandalism!

First one I can remember doing on my own (not typed in from a book or some such) was an RPG helper. I think it was for the "Star Frontiers" RPG.

Hello.

Whatever was the first program in the C64 Manual...or, at least, the first one that worked!

Ah, the joy of the sound commands on the Oric and the Atmos - the trick was, of course, to put a message on screen that said 'Press any Key'; that way you could saunter off to the other side of the shop and prepare for much (nerdy) giggling.

God only knows what the first useful program I wrote was.

Goodbye.

My first games were made in BASIC using Mode 13 and ASCII graphics. I made a few ZZT type games.

Back in High school we had a LAN of 286 machines running Windows 3.1 (brand new OS!!!!). I created a simple chat program using Quickbasic that wrote to a file that all the other programs read/wrote to. Had about 16 students chatting in the computer lab together on this console based chat client before the lab instructor found out and had me banned from the computers at that high school.

hehe, I once received a ban for creating an animating cuckoo clock in qbasic during class ^_^. Perhaps the fact that I corrected that b*astard-teacher on his mistakes during class might have helped.. :D

Ohh.. the memories ^____^

The first I can remember is a simple quiz program in BBC BASIC for the school's BBC Micro computer in 1982.

Mine was circle war, about a year or 2 ago.

All it was was an fps split screen, in which you fought the other circle. No health, just ammo, and an open plane. Lol it wasnt too good..

I did have a book to help me though, so that may not be considered by my self. if so, i really dont know.

mine was battleships against the computer (zx spectrum), the ai for the computer was great, all in basic. let me see, that'll be about 23 years ago.....

Whatever was the first thing in the Spectrum BASIC manual. Also wrote a text adventure (without proper parsing) and music programs using BEEP.

I've a job to remember that far back but I think it was a program to draw a giant Pac-Man. Soon after, I wrote a version of Bomber (which was popular, at the time) - however, the spaceship stopped evey time you dropped a bomb. :/

I then went on to writing several text adventures - my real passion at the time.

My first was a white noise sound effect (supposed to sound like the ocean) copied out of the VIC-20 manual on my 10th birthday.

Youre all a bunch of fibbers. Admit it, your first ever prog was
10 print ¨Hello world¨ or something (..or the modern equ. for those who didnt do oldskool o_O)

Music progs, games and pixel based graphics! Unless copied from a magazine all i can say is ¨My arse!¨

:P)

Hey I said my first 'decent' program! ;)

There used to be a magazine called Home Computing that had a program you could type in to the C64. Try typing in 1000 lines and debugging it.... Come to think of it, I don't think I ever got to play any of those programs cuz I never could get em workin.

Can a single line of code be a program?
Lets define first what is a program...

lol

Actually you could call 10 print a program as it is in fact several lines of machine code ;P

Funny how no-one seems to be writing 'programs' anymore - it all seems to be engines, apps, etc...

I wrote a text adventure in Perl. That cemented my hatred for Perl and my opinion that it is the ugliest popular language.

Poke 53280,0 : Poke 53281,0 : Poke 646,7
Print "Hello"

:)

A text adventure written in Qbasic when I was like 12 years old. I only knew IF, but didn't know how to use variables, which made the game quite lame.

vic-20, some variation of the print "hello" etc.

first complete program was a text adventure on the
original 1bm-pc, also ported to apple II (but due to memory constraints was only about 10 rooms of a dungeon, lol)

Text adventure. When you got to a door it would say "Do you have the red key?". If you answered yes, the door would open. I couldn't figure any other way to do it.

A short little overhead puzzle-action demo in Blitz Basic (2d) about 8 years ago that *may* have had an actual difficulty level if I knew how to write some code to have monsters respect each other's current positions upon the code that moves them around, and not just all pile up ontop of each other in the one corner ready to be slaughtered all at once with no effort.
(I was such a noob to using types back in the day)

Discounting my BASIC bits and pieces written on a Vic-20 and an Amstrad 464, my first ‘heavy-duty’ program was probably a college assignment coded in Turbo Pascal or GW-Basic. Might have even been C-code written in a mainframe environment (PDP-11 or VAX). In any case, it would have been a business-related processing system or some sort of ‘algorithmic challenge’ (eg Fibonacci numbers, etc).

The first real program I can remember doing was a game on the amstrad cpc464 called "ferrari challenge" when I was about ten, I remember editing the system font line by line to do the graphics. you just moved the car left and right to avoid stuff coming down the screen, not very challenging :)

another one if anyone is old enough to remember is the code listings that were in the computer mags of old.

Changing those into something else was quite a laugh :)

Also the ZX81 you basically had to type everything in, all the games were source code in the instruction book. The tape interface was natoriously bad so it was keys all the way :)

I typed in many a program from COMPUTE! magazine.

Print "Hello World!"

A few minutes later:

Repeat
if mousek=1 then draw mousex,mousey
until mousek=2

So was the 16K Ram pack!
I was typing a huge Frogger game from a magazine ('Input' I think) when I accidently nudged the ram pack and **pooof** Lost everything.
Since that thing could pick up the smallest of vibrations it would have been better to call it a Seismometer

First thing I did that was a good finished product was a text adventure on the Vic-20 written for my cousin. It had all sorts of crazy things to do, like making a jam sandwich. I wrote it in BASIC, on an unexpanded machine. I really had to cram every last byte out of it!

The map for the adventure was 8x8 locations. I do remember it had proper text parsing and was quite elegant code (within the limits of Vic BASIC!).

First ever program... not counting those copied out of a book or magazine... I think it was probably the one which made randomly placed, randomly coloured blocks appear on the screen (vic-20 again). I saw the results of such a program on the front of a book or magazine so I read the manual, learned BASIC and then figured out how to program it. I was 7.

First ever completed project on the C64 was a breakout clone done in BASIC. It was slow as hell, but I'd hacked a paddle controller from some crappy home Pong machine and attached it to the joyport. Worked pretty well, but BASIC really was just too slow to make the game enjoyable.

An (entirely linear) text-mode 'graphical' adventure game in GW-Basic.

I can't remember exactly, but it would have been 6809 machine code (no, I don't mean assembler) on an experimenter board wotsit.

I do remember it being an exceptionally tedious process. 8o/

My very first basic program was on the spectrum 48k.
It was just a long series of beeps to play a tune (I think it was Silent Night).

It was a few more years before I delved into machine code (commodore 64 6502), using a machine code monitor. That's when I got into the C64 demo scene. Then around 1992/93 I moved away from programming and became an artist.

2008 is my year for returning to programming (only using Blitz though). C++ scares the hell outta me. :)

My first was a Mastermind type game. My second was a music generator program for the C64, with an interrupt driven player - sold one copy of it.

Jim Brown: Ah yes the fabled rampack wobblers

My first game was a text adventure which was a rather inferior clone of a game I had played called "Space X", I imaginatively named mine "Space Z".

My next game was an expanded version of the old "Growing Snake" game which ran into problems with the framerate (becuase it relied on Specrtrum Basic for all the graphics).

Darkheart

I guess that would have been a level editor for Laser Squad on the ZX Spectrum. We had to reverse engineer the data formats and locations back then of course, so it was part programming/part disassembling, but that was probably my first program.

I did mine in VB, it used an Earth icon form the CD from the book I was using, and it drew it to the screen. Then I had a label with the caption "Click here to blow up the world." When you clicked on the label, the icon changed to a puff of smoke :D

My first program was honestly..

10 PRINT "FANNY TRANNY SUSPENDERS!"
20 GOTO 10

I was 10 years old! Ughh...

I have no idea what my first program was.

The first program I remember however makes me giggle to think back on it. I drew a scene of a couple guys standing on the roof of a building (the graphics were REALLY primitive however, like the characters were represented with tall rectangles) and they had a conversation where they trash talked each other about who could get to the bottom fastest. Then they both jumped off the building, and when they hit the ground the program went into an infinite loop that printed "The End" over and over.

hee hee

My was a Exploding triangle on the Commodore +4 basic. realy nice machine.. but i was about 7-8 years.

and my stupud brother sold that machine.. buyed some donald duck cartoons instead.

somthing caled intertelevision also disrupted me.
and the nes. c64 curse em both :)

now i am living my basic times in blitz basic :D

My first program was an intro coded for the c64.

Too bad I have lost the code... :/

At the end of the machinecodionic age people were saying the same about "all these modern fangled languages" taking the "art" out of programming.
Before that in the late Punchcardochaeic era, when some computer scientists still had feathers, they were in an uproar about this odd new device called a terminal :)

I used to do keyboard charactor animations on my Vic 20. They had all those crazy charactors you could use.

Some code typed off the teachers board on a RC-702 Piccolo in the language COMAL-80, in an afterschool data class when I was 7 or 8 years old.

I don't recall what the program was exactly, but I'm sure it was terribly exciting.

My first first code:

BASIC

>mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmommmmmmmmmmmmm
 
 Mistake

>_

My first actual working code:

BASIC

>PRINT "How can you print with no printer?"

How can you print with no printer?
>_

Early code of mine on C64s in the stores was something like this:

10 PRINT "Hello",,
20 GOTO 10

However I never really understood how those comma things worked - if you remember they made the text display multiple times or something

Hello.

@Matty: I think comma's tab separated print statements, while semi-colons printed directly after with no space/line feeds.

God! I hope I'm wrong.

Goodbye.