Computers

Some of my personal programming history ...

TI-57 Programming - 1981

My very first programming experiences were on a programmable pocket calculator, the Texas Instruments TI-57 to be more precise. During the 4th year of high school (that was 1981 - 1982), there was a constant search for the routine using the least number of instructions to compute solutions for a second-order polynomial equation. I didn't find anything about that routine in my 'archives', but I did find some notes regarding a binary-to-decimal conversion.

The first real programming language - 1982

During my fifth year in high school (1982-1983), the first personal hobbycomputers just became available on the mass-market in Belgium. There was one lucky guy in high school who owned an Apple II, but the rest of us still had to wait a year before we all bought our TI-100, Commodore 64 or ZX-Spectrum. In the mean time, I used to hang out in the laboratory for Applied Mechanics and Energy Conversion, where my dad was employed as professor (thermodynamics, nuclear physics, ... that kind of stuff). That's where I learned FORTRAN, using the book written by Daniel McCracken (1965). Some of the grad students there said, that if I read and completely understood this book, I would know everything about programming 'real' computers.

ZX-Spectrum programming - 1983

In my last year of high school (1983 - 1984), I acquired a ZX-Spectrum. This small hobbycomputer gave me endless hours of programming pleasure. Even now, I can still recite some of the PEEKs and POKEs needed to get the most out of that machine. During that time, I also wrote an adventure game, with the not so original title Lord of Darkness. It was published in ZX-Computing. Some screenshots are shown below. This was also my first try at computer graphics ...