Sat Nov 26, 2011 8:26 am
[quote]Quote from winkleink on November 22, 2011, 10:20
Back in the 80\'s (yes another old guy) when I was playing with Vic-20\'s and C64s in Ireland I learned to program by writing games. Not so much typing in from magazines, but learning from my class mates and creating my own games.
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Hey, a soul mate! I also started with the VIC-20, in 1983. I had to buy the computer used, and I had to spend all my allowance and then some... I was eight years old, living in Finland.
My first program was just one of the examples from the VIC-20 user manual. The one with the flying \"birds\" or the tone generator, I can\'t remember which. After trying all the examples (I didn\'t have the cassette recorder yet) I started adapting them, trying my own stuff.
After a few months, I was able to buy a Commodore 1530 C2N Datasette. I had bought my VIC-20 used, so it came with some games on C cassettes that the previous owner had written from hobbyist magazines of the time. Some of the games were written in BASIC, and by examining them, I learned that you could define your own characters (8 by 8 pixels, two colors) in RAM (POKE 36869, ...). This opened some wonderful possibilites. I made dozens of simple games in BASIC after discovering that.
Later, I also bought the 3k RAM Expansion with the graphics commands for BASIC, as well as a speech synthesizer module. Both of those were tons of fun.
I outgrew the VIC-20 after a few years. Commodore 64 came next. That\'s where I learned 6502 (well, 6510, actually) assembly programming. I borrowed a book from the local library, and it had a simple 6502 assembler/disassembler, written completely in C-64 BASIC. It was almost 20 pages of code. I spent days writing the program (and saving frequently, to tape). After I had typed in the whole program and corrected the errors, I could finally wrote my first assembly language program. It was mind blowing to see your instructions to be executed instantly, compared to BASIC programs.
I made a lot of games, utilizing sound, sprites, self-defined characters, even the 320x200 graphics mode that was new to the C-64. It was really exiting time to learn about computing.
After that came the Amiga, programming in C, operating systems and all the complex topics that really detract from the core of what makes programming fun... Although much of the lessons I learned with the Amiga are still applicable today, albeit in a different field of programming: embedded systems, which I\'m very fond of.
[quote]Quote from winkleink on November 22, 2011, 10:20
Since the goal of the Raspberry Pi is to bring back the excitement and interest that existed in the 80s I was wondering what did you program when you started with computers and secondly are you still coding, either professionally or as a hobby?
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These days, My heart is still with the resource-limited computers of our time, the humble micro-controller. I have found a profession in electronics, using many different 8- and 32-bit microcontrollers. It is very similar to the world of 8-bit computers like it was, back in the day. And I never got interested in the PC side of things, except for Linux and Python.
[quote]Quote from winkleink on November 22, 2011, 10:20
Any suggestions on how to get kids excited about coding would also be welcome.
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A Raspberry PI that boots into a Python shell, with PyGame, PyOpenGL and all the interesting stuff would be a dream machine for teaching kids about programming. Add an Arduino to the mix to teach the physical side of computing, and that\'s about it, I think.
I even made a little logo and everything.
