How I got into Programming…(Part two)
Part one can be found here.
I used to spend my summer vacations with my grand parents in Nuevo Laredo, on the summer of 1984 I read in the newspaper that a local school was starting a 6 month computer operator course. I had no idea what this was but I asked my mom if we could go see it. We visited the school (it was little more than a few class rooms) and we asked if I could take the class just for the summer (about 2 months) I was allowed to take the classes but I had to promise that I would behave in the class and not cause any trouble or I would be expelled and the tuition would not be refunded (the classes were for adults and I was 12 at the time).
I remember the first day I went to classes. I was the youngest one in the class there were a couple of guys who were 18 but everyone else was in their late 20’s. The teacher walked in and assigned seats alphabetically so me being an ‘S’ ended up way in the back of the classroom. Up until now I always sat in the front but since I had agreed that I would behave and not cause any trouble I said nothing. The thing was I could not read what was written on the black board, and I had a hard time keeping up with the rest of the class. After a few days one of the teachers came up to me and told me it was OK if I did not understand everything that this was hard stuff and it would all make sense when I was older I finally broke down in tears and told him that I could not read the black board and I was afraid to complain because I would get kicked out of the class. The teacher just laughed and moved me to the front of the class and suggested I get my eyesight checked. I told my Mother and she took me to get my eyes checked and it turned out that I needed glasses pretty badly, things got a lot easier after that.
I remember I really liked the classes (once I had my glasses) I learned binary and hex there (I had had the computer for about 6 months now but so far the only things I had done was type in basic games programs from magazines) I also learned about flow charts this was a big first step in getting me to write my own programs. It was pretty amazing how you could get the computer to do anything you wanted it to do, if you could only brake it down into pieces the computer could understand.
We would spend about an hour in a class room and then 30 or so minutes in the computer lab. The computer lab was pretty small, It had a couple of Vic-20 computers (the younger brother of my Commodore-64) A terminal to remotely access a IBM Sytem/360 (The mainframe was actually owned and used by a local manufacturing plant, but the manager was also owner of the school so he would allow us to use it, I don’t think I ever actually saw it) via modem, and a bunch of card punchers.
Most of the things we did were done with the card puncher and I was actually pretty good at this. To practice they would have us type in programs (mainly in COBOL) from books, and I had two advantages , first I had already taken 1 year of touch typing in 7 grade (I would be going to 8 the grade later that year) so I kind of knew how to type but probably more importantly I could read/speak english and typical COBOL program reads like english ( I don’t think anyone else in the class could read english except for one of the teachers)
(here is a sample program from the WIKI)
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
PARA-1.
DISPLAY “Hello, world.”.
STOP RUN.
Most of the times the cards where checked visually by the teacher but every once in a while they would take the cards and run them on the computer and bring back the results to class. And it was usually the programs I entered (since they where the ones that had fewer mistakes).
Being able to finish my lab assignments quickly meant that I usually had time to talk to the teachers and top play with the Vic-20. My commodore was in back at my home so I spent the summer with out it. The Vic had been around longer than the commodore so there were a bunch of tricks and tips for it (I knew more tricks for the Vic-20 than the commodore for a while).
We had two teachers (sadly I don’t remember their names, in Mexico we would only refer to our teachers by their title ‘Ingeniero’ , Engineer) one of them was an Electronics Engineer and knew a lot about hardware the other was Computer Science Engineer (He had graduated from the first or second generation CS from the university and joked that he was one of the first 20 CS engineers in Mexico).
One day while talking to one of the teachers he mentioned assembly language and how it was like speaking with the computer in its own language with out any translation, and that this was the best way to actually write your programs. This idea really intriged me this and got me really interested in learning Assembly language for the Commodore.
To be continued
Written by Carlos on May 18th, 2007 with
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