Survey - what language are you coming from?

[Georg Wrede]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Pragma wrote:
> 
>> Don Clugston wrote:
>>
>>> Sean Kelly wrote:
>>>
>>>> Pragma wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I cut my teeth on C64 Basic*
>>>>
>>>> ...
>>>>
>>>>> (*I see that I'm not alone here - it's like those things were built 
>>>>> to train new coders)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I remember being so excited when the C64 magazines arrived in the 
>>>> mail--a friend and I would spend all day entering the printed code 
>>>> to play the new game they contained.  It wasn't my first experience 
>>>> with programming, but it was certainly one of the most significant.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Sean
>>>
>>>
>>> POKE 53280,0: POKE 53281,0
>>> Those were the days.
>>> A lot of my early programming was refactoring the code while typing 
>>> it in because I was such a slow typist.
>>>
>>> I never used C64 BASIC much -- I switched to asm very quickly because 
>>> it was higher level (!) I wrote my own editor/assembler, which let me 
>>> have labels and variable names more than 2 characters long. It booted 
>>> off a cassette drive in 15 seconds using a turboload routine (I was 
>>> too poor to own a disk drive). It's still one of the programs I'm 
>>> proudest of.
>>>
>>
>> 15 seconds?  Now *that's* impressive.  I recall waiting for some games 
>> to load via tape that took 2-3 *minutes*.
> 
> 
> I had a special 'leaderless' cassette, which didn't have the clear bit 
> at the start. When saving it, I tricked the C64 into beginning to save 
> immediately. To get the 15 seconds timing, you had to press 
> shift-run/stop and PLAY on tape as soon as you flicked the power-on 
> switch; you never saw the power-on screen. The turbo loader was saved 
> inside the filename (filenames could be up to 500 bytes long). The 
> editor/assembler itself was about 3K long, and it used primitive 
> compression.
> 
> When saving a file, the code for saving was stored on the screen, which 
> meant you could save from any part of RAM; but if you accidentally 
> pressed {CLR/HOME} the C64 would crash once you hit RETURN, because 
> you'd wiped out the code it was executing.

Just awesome!