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Christoher Manavi -
dev.to staff -
Luke Cartwright -
Martin Cartledge -
Top comments (371)
10 print "Hello World"
20 goto 10
My God thank you! I was reading these replies thinking "these people are all kids" lol
//nod// Save+load from cassette, hoping dearly that you started at the correct counter position and had the tape recorder volume loud enough (but not too loud), then wait...10 minutes...to play Wumpus!
...And there was also the cursed temperamental 16K RAM pack plugged into my ZX81 which would cause the computer to crash if you jostled the thing even slightly--like typing!!
For me it was a Commodore 64 or a Vic 20 which was what our first computer classes in grade 11 used.
I still remember the joy of walking up to a demo computer in a store and doing the 20 goto 10 thing :D
You young whippersnapper! I was at school at a time when the school didn't have any computers. Its entire computing facility consisted of a single teletype terminal that could be connected via acoustic coupler to a mainframe across town. Paper tape was the local storage medium.
It didn't matter. I was hooked.
I only recently joined this community and I'm happy to see more of us 'oldies' here
My school had BASIC when I was 10 years old! Every alternate IT period (Computer period) was a lab session where 30mins was programming and 10mins games. We had to draw a rectangle using BASIC and I used to wonder... HUH! Why can't we just draw it on a paper?! I am not sure whether this comes under "Old enough to remember"... but damn that was long time ago!
Completely agree. I've been through the same thing. They skipped a very important step: explain why we need to write tens of lines code for something that could be done in less than a couple of seconds on a sheet of paper.
If you like to revisit BASIC from a culture and humanities perspective check out 10print.org/
It is a beautiful book
Hey, Thanks! I will check it out. It would be a cool to check how much I remember.
BASIC or Logo?
It was BASIC.
And how brilliant GOSUB was.
I'm old enough to remember Java applets 😄
Damn it
I have to write applet for exam today 😪
My first calculator was a Java applet!
One of the first projects I ever completed was a Java applet with physics simulation, and a bouncing ball.
My mother kicking me off AOL because she was expecting a phone call!
My friend coming round my house to play Habbo Hotel because her Dad put child restrictions on their AOL
OMG it was cat and mouse with us! I was finding workarounds to my parents' parental controls as fast as they could find new ones 😂
Professionally: the double margin float bug in Internet Explorer 6 and hoping for the demise of IE5.
Also, I was aware of IE5 for Mac (different bugs to regular IE5) but never had a Mac at the time to try it out. Now we have Edge for Mac, so what goes around comes around, I guess.
My first web experience: all elements in capital letters and no CSS. Yay for
<FONT>and<CENTER>and of course<BLINK>and<MARQUEE>.The marquee days... I still remember those websites were full of GIF ads 😂
This gif was a thing at those times:
So much of the web was under construction!
😂
FLAMINGTEXT! I miss hokey 00s web stuff!
cooltext.com 😀
Entire site layout done in tables.
Nested tables
...with some CSS thown in that rendered completely differentely in IE than in Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.
Styling MySpace pages! Which were just nested tables with no
classnames orids. So all the CSS had to look likeI had the (dis)pleasure of using IE on a Mac once. If you thought the bugs were bad on IE for Windows... holy crap. That browser was so half-baked.
I still remember DHTML menus and all that stuff.
IE on Solaris was quite a lot better, mostly because they didn’t even try to implement half of it.
Yeah. It was great, alright. Especially when you worked for a company that was Windows based but the only thing on your desktop was a Solaris box because you were in Unix Operations. "You need to do a daily timecard ...but the timecard system only works under IE" (and the IE for Solaris didn't quiiiiiiiiiiite render the page correctly).
That sounds horrible!
FTPing into the server and making live edits. YOLO.
Editing HTML in Notepad!
Pro Version was Notepad++
Notepad++ was the first time I had syntax highlighting and it blew my mind.
I used Notepad2 and it changed my life.
Editing Java files for university coursework in Notepad was one of the reasons I still hold an irrational hatred for Java in my heart.
I stil do this
Table layout
Wait! We are not supposed to use that anymore??
We just call it “grid” now
Another couple of years and it'll be back.
If high-waisted jeans could make a comeback, surely table layouts can!
I mean, table elements are good for, well, laying out tables.
Indeed!
The position: absolute revolution
When the "console", "terminal" or "command prompt" was really just this thing called "DOS"
And it had QBasic. And QBasic was a godsend for learning how the computer actually worked!
Speaking of learning how things worked... Drawing graphics in QBasic? You interacted directly with the video card. There were no drivers. You would have to manually setup which VGA mode you wanted, such as 320x240 pixel with 16 colors. And then very single dot had to be manually plotted on the screen! There were a few libraries for drawing primitives, but these literally did the same thing, CPU based drawing to a generic frame buffer.
Having to choose between 640x480 with 16 colors or 320x200 with 256 was agonizing back in the day!
Color, or resolution... PICK ONE!
Color! Plus 320x200x256 was easy to address because every pixel was a byte in an array.
MOSTLY YES! But there was also some odd-ball hardware that was 16-bit transfers instead of 8-bit. So to draw a single pixel, you had to read two bytes, replace one, then write two bytes back. HOWEVER though, this also meant that just raw performance of painting was twice as fast, as you could draw two pixels in a single operation, if you already knew what both were going to be! (like copying frame buffer for example)
For those who get a kick out of wrangling old hardware to do things it was never designed to.. this back in 2015 blew me away when I found it: int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-102...
But damn the plaids were great. :p
But did you ever have to engage int he joy that was "shape tables"?
Professionally, nothing.
Unprofessionally: Geocities. My sailor moon character had her own website and I loved it.
Geocities ❤️
My first public web project was on Geocities. Spent countless hours figuring out how to z-index over the adverts...
Had a Dragon Ball fan site on geocities, unfortunately, never found in any archive site :(
Yeah I know what you mean. What I'd give for those to have been archived, but it seems like it's not the case.
Love it.
I had a Metallica Fan site on Geocities
Red text on a black background in "Viner Hand ITC" font everywhere
Ah, good ol' red on black, like every goth and industrial website.
Man plenty more I'm sure - it crazy going down the memory lane :)
Tortoise SVN is still a thing! And now we have Tortoise Git, which I use daily. I actually find it faster to do merge conflict resolution and file diffing with Tortoise compared to the command line. :)
Yes indeed but back then it was the only thing. I think it had one off the best diff tools associated with it. I just can’t remember the name.
Tortoise Merge is their diff utility. And yeah, I absolutely love it. Still use it on pretty much every single commit just to verify file changes.
TortoiseHG is my life saviour.
YUI - OMG, someone else remembers that!
Yup way before Bootstrap and the likes
A shoebox of punch cards with my Fortran programs on them. The output was printed on paper with green and white bars. What do I win?
The epithets of "venerable" and "inscrutable", certainly.
don't drop the box (or at least configure the punch machine to print sequence numbers)
Nice - I experienced the 3 week run/debug cycle for a year or so while still in school, then the Maths dept got a Pet - also welcome to dev.to :)
🤯
Vivid memory of my boss putting a box of punched cards on top of his car to drive to a customer and forgetting to put them in the car. First turn cards flew off, still ribbed him about it for years
have a look on my first ever page i did:
web.archive.org/web/19970124165936...
Imagemaps, IE3 Enhanced, 3D Buttons, Fireworks Shadows, FrameSets....
CGI-Scripts, Nervous animated Gifs
:-)
Today looks a bit better: fullstackjob.com
The entire layout for a website being a big ass table.
Haha. Ass table
xkcd.com/37/
Oh, man. Spacer gifs are the one I thought of when I saw this topic. And I remember what a miracle Firebug was when it was released.
This is what we do now, though, because jQuery is bloated and uncool. Time is a flat circle :)
Well, now we can use querySelectorAll and it does everything for us.
Programming in Basic on a VIC 20 and playing video games on my friend's Commodore 64 that were on audio cassettes.
Also, programing in Logo in elementary school.
Old school. 💪
Side note: Years later at a job, I discovered that one of my peers, much older than me, helped build the Logo programming language. 🤯
I did some Logo back in primary school. Those were the days, just pushing the turtle around the screen and making sweet graphics.
That's kind of amazing you got to work with one of the creators!
It was such a fun way to program in elementary school. And of course, someone ported it to JS, because Atwood's Law.
I was a fan of Logo support on Heroku.
I'm technically a minor and I remember both Logo and BASIC from elementary school. And
<font>.