Oolite Bulletins

Disembodied wrote:

If I stare at a plist until my forehead bleeds I can usually work out which bits do what, and, if forced, might be able to cut, paste and mangle other people's code into doing something slightly different but essentially the same … but asking me to write code from scratch is a non-starter.

<grins> Yep... ditto!

I've added an extra choice to the poll.

Edit: woops, doing that resets the votes (learn to read, stupid)... Sorry (IIRC the votes were something like 1/5/3/3/3).

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BTW, I got my first computer in high school. It was a TO7-70 featuring a light pen (an 8bits, 6502-based computer from Thomson). I don't remember having harassed my parents to have one. Maybe me and my younger brother asked Santa. My father was working with computers at his job, in a plant that was making large plastic pipes. At that time, "family computers" were popular but computers at work, not so much. So we got this second-hand family computer and a box containing a few games (on cassettes) and a book with Basic listings for games. The listings were pretty well explained and encouraged experimentation. Next we got an Amstrad CPC6128, an 8bit Z80-based family computer. Its Basic interpreter was pretty similar to the TO7, so it was easy to port the programs from the book. It also came with CP/M and Logo. One thing I remember about those two machines is their manuals. The TO7 manual was quite technical, and the CPC manual was quite educational.

In College I got my first PC, A second-hand 386. At that time I was interested in three things: Operating systems, programming languages and Artificial intelligence. All of the arcane and magical stuff. I got myself an assembler/disassembler, and a mysterious programming language I had heard of: Forth.

At university we had Pascal courses. This was my first formal (and high-level) programming course. Around this time the hard drive of my PC broke. I decide not to replace it because I spent to much time on it between games and attempts to program a sentient AI . The computers at the Uni were good enough.

Eventually I half-succombed to the temptation and bought a very old and cheap so-call "portable" Toshiba computer. That thing was built on an 8086 at 10Mhz (in turbo mode!) and a 20Mb hard disk. At least it couldn't run games. But yet again I spent way too much time on silly stuff like programming a kind of OS. A Forth interpreter that could boot from a floppy and recompile itself.

I failed two times my first year of Uni. Not enough programming and way too much chemistry and physics (CS was just an option, not the main dish). So I had to switch from the general CS curriculum to "industrial CS" - the field that specialises in making the programs my father would have used. This time a lot of C/C++/assembly programming, and little "useless" stuff (kids: nothing taught at school is useless). That got me my first and current job.

Astrobe wrote:

pagroove wrote:

Today I have made more music for stations in BGS. And my contribution is mostly on the ambience side of the game. Although I am (luckily) a small part of this excellent community.

Sir. It's easy to find programmers willing to make a game. But graphics/audio artists... I believe they are the most valuable for an open source project. No school can teach how to do these things right.

Yes but actually I wish I would be good in programming. So I could do more.

Having only produced a single OXP, with much of the code lifted from other OXPs, I wouldn't go so far as to call myself an OXP programmer.. however..

In high school I passed on the opportunity to take programming (using punchcards, similar to what spud42 described) as an elective, and opted for learning touch-typing instead. I've never regretted learning to type properly, but sometimes wonder what might have happened had I gone for programming instead.

in the following couple of years, I developed an interest in electronics, and recall getting seriously irritated when the electronics magazines began to focus more and more on kit computers and other computing related matters, dropping a lot of the content I was most interested in.

Later, in my early 20s, I came across the Casio PB-100 pocket computer in a store, and was intrigued enough to buy it. It was extremely limited in capabilities, but using it I taught myself BASIC in a weekend, and wrote my first program, which could track all my car's running expenses and calculate Miles Per Gallon, Litres Per 100km, and convert between them. I was hooked.

I acquired a Commodore Vic20, which I used to improve my BASIC skills, and then proceeded to learn 6502 Assembler on, after having typed in an assembler from a listing. Later I obtained a C64, learned Pascal, and continued working on my assembler skills, culminating in writing an occasional article on assembler programming for the Australian Commodore Review magazine. I graduated to an Amiga 500, which was my first exposure to programming in C. Despite Amiga OS being an absolute dream machine for a C programmer (and probably the best documented computer, ever), I found I still preferred working in assembler, most of the time.

Sadly, Commodore totally botched things up, and the Amiga passed into history. I wasn't interested in the 386 and 486 PCs which were dominating the market, as I considered them clunky, inferior toys running a poor excuse for an operating system, and distinctly unfriendly to assembler programmers. The Apple machines of the day were just too damn expensive for my tastes/budget, and the whole 'exclusive club' mentality of most Apple users rubbed me the wrong way, so I pretty much just walked away from computing in general.

That mostly ended my interest in computers for quite a few years, until around the turn of the century, when I took a general course in IT, having realised that now I was getting older, I needed to work less with my body, and more with my brain, if I wanted to achieve some of my life goals. I next settled on obtaining a network engineering diploma, despite my programming instructor trying very hard to get me to switch streams, claiming I was one of the best students she'd ever had.

Since then, most of my IT related work has been in tech support, and I've picked up a passable amount of HTML and CSS, in the course of maintaining the website for my brother's business. I wouldn't mind getting back into coding some more, and picking up a couple of more current languages, but frankly, finding the time isn't easy.

Diziet Sma wrote:

I came across the Casio PB-100 pocket computer in a store

I also owned one of these. With it I had one of my most distressing computer moments ever. I'd been using it for a while (weeks) when I decided it might be fun to "pop open the hood" and see what was inside. Those things had tiny screws, and everything was crammed into a very small space. I'd gotten all but one of the screws out, and the last one just wouldn't come out (I didn't have magnetic screwdrivers to help lift them). So, without thinking about the consequences I picked the unit up, turned it over and gave it a shake...

Bits. Went. Everywhere.

I had no idea how to put things back together as I hadn't been able to pull them out in order. I gave it a shot but my poor PB-100 was kaput. Press space, commander epic-fail!

Ouch. This reminds me I ask Santa for an expansion ROM for my CPC6128. I had read in magazines that assembler gave full control over the machine and was much better than Basic. That expansion ROM offered an assembler and a disassembler and lots of other yummy magic commands, too. It was very simple to install: a black box to be connected to the expansion bus, and a ROM chip to connect in one of the sockets inside the box. Being a kid, I plugged it all without reading the instruction manual, switched the computer on: won't start.

I plugged the ROM chip the wrong way. Day one, fried. I almost feinted when I realized that. At still the computer was still working, though.

I acquired a Commodore Vic20, which I used to improve my BASIC skills, and then proceeded to learn 6502 Assembler on, after having typed in an assembler from a listing.

me too Dizzy, after spending two days typing in the code from a commodore magazine into the vic20 i had to spend a week debugging it to get it to work. tiny blurry font not good for code..lol

i also got a Scorcerer computer from Dick Smith. there were user groups and everything. Someone clever designed a hard drive interface for it. built it on proto board but never really got it to work. i think the Sorcerer was based on a 6502 as well...either that or a Z80

spud42 wrote:

i think the Sorcerer was based on a 6502 as well...either that or a Z80

Yeah, the Sorcerer's were Z80 based.

very hard to get info on now... the best i have is a magazine advert....

Not a programmer. Leaned heavily on others to produce my small clutch of oxps.

But it is impressive how people have taught themselves through Oolite - I'm really impressed with Redspear's achievements (just see his massive number of oxps - and his work on the vanilla game code), and also with Zireael - from Poland - who allegedly started playing Oolite to teach himself English. Zireael supposedly programmed all his pirates to speak in Received Pronounciation, whilst his police Vipers spoke with a cockney accent!