Some computer-related scans from the past...
TI-57 Programming - 1981
My very first programming experiences were on a programmable pocket calculator,
the 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 the 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. Flowcharts,
comments, and program-code are given. Click on the pictures to get full-scale
diagrams.
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 here 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.
So, I used to carry this book around during the next few weeks. During
one of the study-hours in high school (when we were supposed to study and
make our homework), I was reading this FORTRAN book. One of the supervisors
saw this, and commanded me to put it away, saying it wasn't homework and
I would better study math. I said, that in order to understand this book,
you had to understood math first, but obviously, he didn't get the point.
That was, of course, before the first computers were bought by our school.
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 ...
To be continued ....
This file is maintained by Philip.Dutre@cs.kuleuven.ac.be
