I started with Integer BASIC on an Apple II the summer of 1978. I went on to Applesoft BASIC, and then Apple Pascal.
When I went to Texas A&M in 1981, I started in Electrical Engineering, and took courses in FORTRAN and IBM 360/370 Assembly. I enjoyed those so much that I changed my major to Computer Science. We used PL/I for data structures class, and in the Programming Languages Survey we focused on Ada and Prolog, with brief mentions of other languages. I did a little bit of work for an Engineering professor in Turbo Pascal.
For my senior project, I got to use the CS department's new VAX 11/750 running BSD Unix. For my project I taught myself C so that I could assist a grad student on his "syntax-directed text editor" project. I've been in love with Unix and C ever since then, but didn't get to use it at work for several years.
My first real job out of college started June 1985, and it was programming interactive training systems running in a proprietary courseware design system on Sony CP/M Z-80 computers and Laser Videodisc players. The courseware system was buggy, so I talked my group into using C instead, which allowed us to be more responsive, have less crashes, and put more content on a floppy disk. The Z-80 C compiler was produced by BSD Software, which stood for "Brain-Damaged Software". It was so named because they didn't support floating point math, but that was ok because we could get by with various tricks and get done what we needed to do.
When I went to Texas A&M in 1981, I started in Electrical Engineering, and took courses in FORTRAN and IBM 360/370 Assembly. I enjoyed those so much that I changed my major to Computer Science. We used PL/I for data structures class, and in the Programming Languages Survey we focused on Ada and Prolog, with brief mentions of other languages. I did a little bit of work for an Engineering professor in Turbo Pascal.
For my senior project, I got to use the CS department's new VAX 11/750 running BSD Unix. For my project I taught myself C so that I could assist a grad student on his "syntax-directed text editor" project. I've been in love with Unix and C ever since then, but didn't get to use it at work for several years.
My first real job out of college started June 1985, and it was programming interactive training systems running in a proprietary courseware design system on Sony CP/M Z-80 computers and Laser Videodisc players. The courseware system was buggy, so I talked my group into using C instead, which allowed us to be more responsive, have less crashes, and put more content on a floppy disk. The Z-80 C compiler was produced by BSD Software, which stood for "Brain-Damaged Software". It was so named because they didn't support floating point math, but that was ok because we could get by with various tricks and get done what we needed to do.