Computing Systems / Programming Languages Exposure Timeline

My father was taking programming courses at the University of Houston. His courses involved programming in both COBOL and Fortran. This was back in the day when jobs were submitted via punch cards. He would write out his programs on paper before going down to the UH Computer Center to punch them out on cards. I doubt I learned much of either Cobol or Fortran, but I did get some idea about how to write programs.

A work colleague of my father's had purchased a VIC-20 for his children to use. When we visited, I would write simple BASIC programs.

My friend John, who lived down the street, had a CoCo I. Occasionally, we wrote programs in Extended BASIC. Mostly, we played video games.

My friend Antonio Poveda, had a Sinclair. We would write programs to graph various formulae, using Sinclair 1000 BASIC.

Brent, another friend, had an Apple ][e. This was the nicest system I had the opportunity to use, up until this point. We wrote small programs in AppleSoft BASIC.

Antonio got an Adam and it quickly became the primary platform that we worked on. We continued exploring graphs of algebraic formulae using SmartBASIC, which was included with the Adam.

My first personal computer.   This computer revolutionized my computing experience. Until now, computing was something that I did on the rare occasion that I was in the right place and my friends were in the right mood. My computer use time increased by at least two orders of magnitude. Most of what I did was in AppleSoft BASIC, although the magazine programs would sometimes call for Integer BASIC instead.

A friend of mine, Christian, had a PCjr. His father originally purchased it to use for work purposes, but soon replaced it with a PC AT system. I only used it once or twice and programmed it in BASIC.

For a brief period of time, I had the Apple LOGO II system. The main thing I recall is that it was enourmous fun working with the turtle graphics.

What's notable about my first introduction to the Mac is that I was terribly disappointed that it didn't have a built-in BASIC &mdash or any other bundled programming language. Since I equated using a computer with programming it, this made the Mac seem particularly useless.

My first computer class. Although someone had donated some IBM PCs to the school, the class was based on the TRS-80 Model IV system. I had used the Model IV before at Radio Shack, but this system was even better because it was networked. The teacher controlled the student nodes from her system, but we could still do some programming on our own. Our programs were most likely in Disk Based BASIC.

I had spent a lot of time typing in programs from COMPUTE! magazine. Mostly they were in either AppleSoft or Integer BASIC. Occasionally, there would be ASM routines for speeding up particular computations. This drove me to begin investigating 6502 Assembly language, with Machine Language for Beginners, by Richard Mansfield, as my primary reference. The book included an assembler program.

My friend Carl Waggerman had a C64 and used to run a BBS on it. I never did any programming on it

Matt also had a TI 99/4A which we programmed occasionally in Basic.

My first CS class (Data Structures) using Turbo Pascal. I still recall the stack-based maze solver, using backtracking. This was notable to me because I also wrote a utility program to edit the mazes. This was my first exposure to the idea of using a utility program external to the main program to modify the data.

This time around I borrowed a Mac from Pan Am and used it at home for an entire holiday weekend. I wrote my first GUI program in TurboPascal for Mac that weekend. I began learning 68000 assembly as well as HyperCard.

Pan Am got this system for a OS class, but it wasn't used very often. I only used it for dialing up the local BBS systems. It was, however, my first SYS V exposure.

The university also had a VMS Cluster, comprised of a VAX 8550 and a VAX 8700. I had access to a guest account on the system and was able to access BITNET, as well as learn a small amount of DCL. I was also able to learn some VAX assembly from my friend Eric.

My favorite lab to work in was in the Math building, because it allowed me to learn from other student's projects like: writing databases in DBASE IV, writing expert systems using Prolog and writing TSRs for DOS using Turbo Pascal.

This was the first time I had any real opportunity to use UNIX at any length. Most of my programming revolved around learning CSH and elisp. Over winter break, I read through Bach's The Design of the UNIX Operating System.

My first CS class at CMU, 15-100, involved programming in Pascal using the locally developed Pascal Genie system.

Through my friends and roommate, I was exposed to many languages that I otherwise wouldn't have been at this point: Ada and Modula-2 from my friend Phil, who was a senior. My roommate, who was a CS major, was learning C. I recall specifically that his semester-long assignment was to build up a Lisp interpreter.

15-211 was in C.   We were required to learn C on our own, as the lectures focused on data structures and other techniques. We did many interesting projects, including implementing LZW compression and text justification algorithms.

15-212 was in scheme. There were many excellent projects in this class including implementing a message-passing OO system that emulated a network of SMTP servers and a propositional calculus theorem prover.

I took a job as Systems Administrator for the Statistics Deptartment at CMU. I learned S in the course of doing some statistical analysi for work. I also learned perl, which I used extensively for systems programming.

This was my first exposure to the Internet from an operators point of view. I learned awk and sed in order to maintain some of the infrastructure.

As I became more involved in mastering TCP/IP, BGP and other routing protocols, I had less time to learn new programming langauges. I used C and perl for work. At home, I began to pick up scheme again, as I worked through The Structure and Interpretation of Programs.

I picked up C++ for personal use. OOP appealed to me. I soon learned how to do OOP in perl, thanks to chicken. From class instruction, I learned both Java and SML. I even used Java (under Windows 95) to write the final project for my AI class.

During this time, I switched to using bash as my primary shell. I also began learning Common Lisp and used it to write a number of analysis programs for processing large data sets.

In order to facilitate my daughters in launching their preschool and toddler games, I wrote a series of Applescripts that handle the various issues, from mounting the disk images, to launching the application, to killing Classic emulation (when necessary) to unmounting the disks.

I also wrote a Javascript widget for searching the CL HyperSpec!