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How did you learn to program?
Week 28 Group Rant
gosubinit
8y

I started coding in 1994 making .BAT menus for my DOS games. Used HELP.EXE to find commands I could use. Then I figured out how to modify and run GORILLA.BAS (using Q-Basic). Man, when I realized that all BASIC commands were in the OS documentation as well, that was the Red Pill! Just started to copy commands and blocks from the Gorillas game into a new program, read the doc, modify, run and learn. Btw, the first BASIC command I played with was "PLAY" (for music).

At that time I was 10 and there was no Stackoverflow, no Youtube, no tutorials, no Google... no easy path to follow down the rabbit hole.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

undefined

game

wk28

qbasic

basic

msdos

dos
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Comments
  • 3
    8y
    Oh the memories! Your story is very similar to mine :)
  • 3
    8y
    You, Sir, are a legend
  • 4
    8y
    Same for me... QBasic was a great enabler at the time!
  • 3
    8y
    Also QBasic and learning the commands with consulting F1.

    Sometimes I even wonder if this immediate response running the program through the interpreter provided a better workflow than I have now with the longer compile times and other commands in between. (Unfortunately there's not much space for lisp or python at my workplace)
  • 1
    8y
    I remember that game
  • 3
    8y
    Haha, awesome. So similar to my story... Used to build Batch menus that looked as my folks expected but had hidden commands to get to the games etc which I had added. Then also QBasic and by the time school started with Logo I was getting into VB3 and c++
  • 2
    8y
    The end of that gif is so disappointing
  • 2
    8y
    Oh man I can relate to that story too :)
  • 1
    8y
    Started in 1987 on one of the first IBM PC AT clones (home built) with Assembler and moved up to BASIC and batch files. Long hours at 13 years of age poring over big, thick books on all of that.
  • 2
    8y
    Oh man. This is my story also =D the gorillabananagame <3
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