My very first staggering steps with programming were made with Basic, and commands like INPUT that allowed me to create simple text adventures. As silly as it might sound, my biggest hurdle was to figure out how to make realtime action games, reading input from any sort of user device (using GET and JOY) without waiting for input, and designing game cycles in such way that they gave the impression of multitasking (keep in mind there was no such thing as threads). These machines and the Basic interpretor were extremely slow so making anything move a little...er...smoothly, let alone creating a game, was a challenge in itself.

Oh yeah, you might wonder what I mean with "these machines". Forgot to mention this was on the Commodore 16.

*salutes*

My first one was that game with crosses and circles (in Portuguese is jogo do galo, cock game) in pascal with graphics...
Good times...

@RodrigoF You mean tic, tac, toe? Luffarschack in Swedish.

@TerriToniAX yep, fuking tic tac toe

@TerriToniAX I was the only one to do with graphics instead of chars, so top grade for that :p

@RodrigoF *thumbs up*

@RodrigoF you were THAT guy, huh?
I was, too :) always go the extra mile. Problem was, made me look like a teacher's pet when I was just bored and enjoyed programming so I played with expanding the assignment :D

Well, I learnt QBASIC in secondary school, just the basics but ventured deep into the graphics from the documentation that was available under Help. I had no internet access back then. I tried making a car racing game but it sucked (I made a very shitty version). So I tried animation. Made a stop motion animation of a *colored* (Color in QBASIC was way too awesome to me back then 😂) man walking, climbing a flight of stairs, and walking into a door. Showing it to class and impressing even the teacher. I don't think he knew you could do that in QBASIC.

Ended up being the teacher's assistant (kinda). Classmates would call the teacher to troubleshoot and he would send me off to see what went wrong. Was a fun couple years back then.

I learned basic from booklets from the Open University here in Israel. The booklets had me program a jumping robot... I have yet to meet anyone except my brother who had ever heard of them.

My first real programming book was Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and it took me eight years to read since I couldn't understand most of it so kept going back again and again until I did.

@Bikonja The classes were to slow... And I was addicted...
Tic tac toe with chars? Bah...
We weren't going to learn how to draw in pascal so I just studied the book and did it by myself...
Btw I made a rpg in my Texas ti83 arround the same time... That's one reason why I flunked math...

@RodrigoF An RPG on a ti83, that's an achievement! :)

@BlurryFace5178 Ooh, I remember QBasic and its predecessor GwBasic. I liked these dialects a lot as they reminded of MSX Basic, another favourite. I have a vague memory that at some point I might have written a simple convertor that translated QBasic code into Amos, a basic dialect for the Amiga.

@TerriToniAX yah... Didn't had space left for graphics... Still was fun, used diablo logic for random damage (a mp5 was like 10-20 damage), health packs and infinite map (had 2 or 3 char based maps that would repeat..) pretty neat... Till my jerk math teacher deleted everything because I could had all the test hanser there...

Pew... I hid information for tests in a graphic chart lol (you could call a graphic, like a circle, line, stuff, write in it and save as graphic)

@RodrigoF What a really encouraging teacher! *sarcastic applause to him*

@TerriToniAX Actually he was...
Problem was that half the class didn't understand shit... So classes had to be adapted to the weeker students...
That teacher gave us the basics I still use today... Basically we spend 3 months doing logic programming on paper, he gave us comcepts like the user is always stupid and prone to find the weirdest bugs and stuff...
But he always helped me doing more then the basics.
Like in visual basic (this was when windows 98 came out and mIRC was still black and white), while others used the graphic interface to control databases I was doing everything db related by code (way much more liberty and less user errors), I adjusted images to weigh less while others were using big (1, 2mb) images for icons... Stuff like that, basics I bring to any new language...
That bases allow me to learn any language easely and I believe it's a must have for any programmer

@RodrigoF Then he was an encouraging jerk! :D

@TerriToniAX yep, who liked to pick up girl students...

Still I own him for what I know today, programming related

@RodrigoF Reminds me of an English teacher I had. He knew English like a native and was excellent at teaching, but...he was also a jerk. He had his "pets" (I believe I was one of them) to whom he was good, but he could be really mean to those students that were weak or just shy.

@TerriToniAX yep we all had one of those (or more)
My first was on second year...
I had exceptional memory, so I wouldn't study and had high grades.
Still the teacher wouldnt understand... Between physical abuse and flunking, although I had 5/5 grades the bitch sended me home lots of times because I was bleeding...
To bad she wasn't arrested...

@RodrigoF Hold on, did you just say what I thought you said? The teacher abused you physically? OMG!!! =:-O

@RodrigoF One teacher abusing students physically, and another just getting physical with them. That's just horrible! In my country, they would be fired and if they'd ever be hired as teachers again that would be to teach their fellow convicts.

In 3rd to 4th grade I had a teacher who was really lazy. If there was a fight in the schoolyard, and there often was, and you told him about it, he would just call you a squealer. And if you did any more progress than the rest of the class, like finsihing all the exercises in the math book, he would get FURIOUS and say things like "What SATAN will I give you to do now?". At least he found the energy to swear lazy though he was.

@TerriToniAX yep.. Not rape ofcourse... But I would get home bleeding lots of times... And she loved to shove the pencil in the kids forehead