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Showing posts with the label origins

Budding Programmers.... Subscription to Learn

Harping back to my prior post about learning to program, when I spoke at my old Uni, I spoke to a lovely trio of ladies, whom wanted to be programmer/computer folks... And one thing struck me, was how narrow their knowledge was. When they asked me how I got into programming and I explained that when I learned to program in the 1990's there was no github, indeed there was no internet, you could not just go and download a program or join an open source project.  If you wanted tool, and had no BBS dial up to find someone with something like it, you wrote your own. I wrote code to record kills in games on the Atari ST, I wrote text editors for the ST and DOS (EGA graphics FTW), I write 2D painting programs for DOS.... I distinctly remember my college tutor seeing my using DOS interrupt 11 to control the mouse and his saying "you're the first person I've seen work that out"... I didn't work it out by trial and error though, I worked it out by reading, about the DOS...