Christopher Finke writes about software, woodworking, and other creative endeavors.

What was your first program?

The first computer program I ever wrote was written in GW-BASIC. I was 8 or 9, and my dad had gotten me a book from the library that included the BASIC code for simple text-based games; after typing them into our IBM and playing around with them for a few hours, I decided to use what I had learned to write my own program, and it went something like this:

10 INPUT “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”, N$
20 IF N$ = “CHRIS” THEN PRINT “YOU ARE COOL”
30 IF N$ = “AARON” THEN PRINT “YOU ARE DUMB”
40 END

I thought it was pretty cool; my brother Aaron probably disagreed. I recall having plans to use this program to not only tell me that I was cool, but to store all sorts of secret information that it would only print out if I ran the program, since no one else would think to type in my name. (I suppose this would also count as the first password I ever chose on a computer: my name. Way to go, 8-year-old self.)

Anyway, there’s not much more to this story, but I was wondering:

If you’re a programmer, what was the first program you wrote? What was the first thing you made a computer do that it wasn’t already programmed to do?

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13 responses to “What was your first program?”

  1. Tom Drapeau Avatar
    Tom Drapeau

    Almost the exact same as you here. For me, it was a Choose Your Own Adventure-style game, typed in from Analog magazine on an Atari 400. It was great, until I shut the computer off to go swimming at the town lake. See, there was no non-volatile storage on that Atari.

    Soon after, we came into the 80’s and hooked up a cassette tape for storage. Those were the days, of 3 minute load times for a 16k program. :-)

    Reply
  2. Jacob Avatar
    Jacob

    I remember the day well… it was January 2004. You (Chris) had set up a website for me. It included sample things of what I could potentially do on it (i. e. different-sized text, different colors, different text alignments, etc.) complete with cheery little notes like, “I am normal-sized text!”, “I am green text!”, and “I am text that is aligned to the left side of the page!”
    The page featured a picture of me looking very sleepy, brushing my teeth, and making a weird face at the camera.
    The first thing I did was delete that image…

    Reply
  3. Alex Laburu Avatar
    Alex Laburu

    The earliest program of which I still have a printout (last seen during my last move) dates from 1988 and is in MS BASIC; it finds the two integers of up to three digits each the ratio of which is closest to Pi. It was written on the Amstrad CPC6128, but I suspect it would run on any other machine from that era that has MS BASIC in its ROM.

    Reply
  4. fod Avatar
    fod

    10 print “fuck”
    20 goto 10

    (I was about 12 and thought it was hilarious)

    Reply
  5. fbz Avatar
    fbz

    i wrote the animal game in BASIC from the help of 3-2-1 contact magazine. my dad would “play” it (i.e. feed it information) while i was away and thus make it more interesting to figure out the animal i thought up would already be in the database or not. i think i was 8 when i first wrote it.

    are you thinking of an animal? is it bigger than a toaster?

    Reply
  6. Glyph Lefkowitz Avatar
    Glyph Lefkowitz

    It was an APL program on an Atari 1000. I was about 8 years old, and already a big fan of Infocom adventure games. My father taught me the assignment operator – “?” – and I wrote a program that looked like this:

    WEST?’YOU ARE IN A FOREST. THERE ARE SOME TREES HERE.’
    EAST?’YOU ARE IN A HOUSE. ON THE FLOOR THERE IS A SWORD.’

    “APL 68K”, as I believe it was called, for the Amiga, had an interactive interpreter, so I entered these programs at a prompt, and then delighted in typing:

    > WEST
    YOU ARE IN A FOREST. THERE ARE SOME TREES HERE.

    repeatedly.

    At the time, I don’t believe it occurred to me that there was anything else involved in writing a program; I spent the better part of a week trying to figure out what you could possibly assign to WEST to have it know that the *second* time that you typed it, you wanted to go west *again*. Needless to say this was an exercise in frustration.

    It was two years before I tried to write a program again, the next time in HyperCard. But it was weeks before I realized I was writing a program.

    Reply
  7. Glyph Lefkowitz Avatar
    Glyph Lefkowitz

    Sorry, I forget that unicode doesn’t work on the interwubs. The assignment operator was not question mark, it is supposed to be U+2910, “LEFTWARDS ARROW”.

    Reply
  8. xander lih Avatar
    xander lih

    There was a basic program on the C-64 I remember that would scroll random “/” and “\” to make a maze, but I don’t think I wrote it.

    There was a show on “Chaos Theory” and they described the Sierpinski Triangle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_triangle ], and it was simple enough in rules for me to create one in basic. No imaginary numbers. I think it was my first real, not from a magazine or variation of a standard, program.

    Reply
  9. POSTer Avatar
    POSTer

    Remind me of 20 goto 10 ^^

    Reply
  10. Alex Avatar
    Alex

    I remember that my first program was written in batch code on xp (state of the art at that time – 2001). I was 12yo and intrested in hacking ( lol ), so i made a virus that consisted in :

    @echo off
    echo “THIS IS A VIRUSE!”
    PAUSE

    I never understood why it didn’t spread …

    Reply
  11. Alexander Baldwin Avatar
    Alexander Baldwin

    My first program was echo "Hello World!"; mainly because a book told me to. It was ages before I realised you could do much more fun things if you actually learnt the language!

    Reply
  12. Bouba Avatar
    Bouba

    1st program ever ? a loop.

    10 FOR I = 1 to 100
    20 PRINT I
    30 NEXT I

    It was a kind of benchmark test for me.
    I started with a Texas Instrument TI99/4A which turned out to be the slowest computer on the market despite its 16bit CPU. VIC20 and TRS-80 Mod I were way faster…
    If you’re nostalgic too, take a look at the multi-emulator MESS (www.mess.org) and this museum: oldcomputers.net

    Cheers and thanks for RSS Ticker!

    Reply
  13. Bielawski Avatar
    Bielawski

    My first was an MS-DOS batch file that pretended to format all your drives.

    Reply

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