For some reason, the first “real” program I ever wrote popped into my head today. It was written in BASIC on the Vic-20 sometime in 1984 and it would print out a letterhead on my new printer – an MPS-801. Coupled with Speedscript, my father was able to print out letters for our motel, though it really didn’t get much use to be honest. Still, I was quite proud of my work – I spent ages copying our logo to graph paper, counting the pixels, then calculating the hex codes required to reproduce the image on the printer.
This wasn’t the first program I ever wrote, but it was the first serious program designed and written for specific purpose. I had tinkered with modifying all manner of type-in programs from magazines, and had come up with a few neat little hacks such as the password protection I put on my Appple II disks. (The password was 3.141592653589793237462643383279 or JIHAD or you could hit ctrl-C at the right moment.) And the games on the infamous “Druggies and Dice” were too trivial and esoteric to really count…
You know what? I think I still have a cassette tape with the letterhead program on it stashed away in my back room. I wonder if it is still readable?
A year or so later I mostly wrote a database app for a local travel agency but that was a step up from what I had – the job was to be done on a Commodore 64 with a disk drive! Wow! I had fun with that one. Shame they never got a chance to use it…
So what are your earliest coding memories? Ever wrote a word processing system? Database? Simple spreadsheet? I’d done those three by the time I was 17, and all were done in BASIC. Surely some of you can remember better stories than mine! 
I will make it a goal to enter the dig and try to locate the Vic-20 tapes so I will be able to see i they still work. If they do I will run the letterhead program and take a picture of the output. One or two of you take it amongst yourselves to keep on my back ’til I do this please. My email address is arb @ oldskoolblog dot com
that’s easy, in that it wasn’t that long ago, about 14 years ago or so. i was a graphic designer, publishing a zine, and i got some web space from my local isp. well, i slapped up a few html pages but wanted something a bit more. i noticed a few sites i would see had the ability for people to leave comments on their pages. i had no idea how that worked until i noticed one such page had a link to a free cgi script site. well, i went there and downloaded a few guestbook cgi scripts and after about a week of playing with one, i managed to get it to work (just by sheer will and determination, because, at the time, that’s all i had, absolutely no background in computers). well, after about week of that i decided i wanted to create my own. oh boy. i learned that this cgi script was written in a thing called PERL. i had no idea what that was, oh sure i knew what computer languages were, they were things for smart people with math degrees. i was neither. but, not really caring, i just said “fuck it” and locked myself in my family’s home office and spent all my spare time learning this crazy languge. it took about 6 months to finally “get it.” and even then my code was crap, but i had a working guestbook.
feeling confident in that, and it being 1995, i figured “hey i learn this new java thing.” and yeah… the rest is history.
Yay for teh blinder!
My first web site was for my then employer, the La Trobe Shire Council. We had a 56K dial up line and the site lived on a box at our end of the line for some time. I knew bugger all about HTML and Javascript, yet I managed to get something reasonably decent up and running over the space of about a week.
Being 1997, naturally I used frames and glassy, rounded, chiseled buttons, generated by one of the multitudinous button-maker programs available at the time. My piece de resistance was the location map – I scanned in a map from one of our brochures, but it was not good enough for the web site, so I turned that scan into a black & white mask, creaed some nice gradient fills and stamped out the shapes of the ocean and land. I pasted these stamps into a new Paintbrush document, carefully added some shadow highighting, very carefully drew in the major towns and roads (correcting a major blunder in the original map in the process) and finally adding labels and a title to the map. Most of this was done in Paintbrush because that was all I had available to me. I spent the beast part of a day on that map and was danged proud of how it turned out. Even after the site got a professional make-over my map stayed prominently displayed. My one real achievement in the world of grahic design! ;^)