When I was about 12 years old my stepfather brought a commodore 64 computer, the particular model was an SX64 as shown in the photo, it was one of the first "portable" computers.. I started to learn to program it in BASIC which was built in as the "operating system"
I spent over two weeks copying the data for an animated sprite from a magazine in to my computer after school only to find out it didn't work. This was first attempt at "programming" something if you call typing code from a magazine in to a computer programming !
The next month's issue had an addendum, the code had an error in it, so after digging up the cassette that had my saved copy on I went to work and fixed it, and much to my amazement it worked..
It was a learning experience, the article broke down each step and explained how it worked, remember this was all new back when computers where new especially home pc's. By just typing it in I could understand the flow of the program, and how it branched I learn t what the commands where and I also now understand how to define data in a table and then access it with a sub routine rather then having to rewrite it for the next frame of the animation.
And something I found out was that I have a skill that is slowly being lost, tight coding. Want more overhead today you just increase the system specs on the side of the box, need 2 gig to install not a problem. Well with single sided 5 1/4 inch floppy discs and 64KB yes that KB of memory you couldn't afford to leave comments in your code, or space it out with unnecessary white space to make it easier to read when debugging it was all hardcore baby.....
From there I got really involved with XT'x and C64's at my school and spent many a lunchtime in the computer lab. By the time I left home at 16 I had 3 commodores, 8 drives, and AT with VGA screen (256 colors at 640x480) and a 40MB hard drive, it was state of the art and cost me $2000.
From there I didn't do much with coding, I had friends that got in to programming in machine code on the C64 but I liked the hardware more.. It wasn't until the late 90's that I got in to IRC when I started coding again, this time it was for mIRC and I started by just doing single line alias commands and stuff like that. Later I downloaded looksharp (a custom distro of mIRC) and started to have a look at the scripts in it and how they worked, from there I then modified them to do different things.
Up until last week I didn't call myself a programmer, not in anyway shape or form, I have always maintained that I am a Hardware tech..End of story. It was while at a friends place last week (tyabblemons) that I saw him playing with mIRC and his bot, I was having a look and was telling him about how I used to play with scripting in the 90's. and also did some basic but that I wasn't a programmer.
He disagreed with me saying that if I had skills programming, even in BASIC and mIRC and if I understood operators like if then else etc then I could program, So I went home and started playing and showed him a few bits of mIRC code and he still maintained that my skills are competent and I just don't know the command structure of modern programming languages. All I need to do is change my BASIC skills in to something else.
So first thing I am doing is writing a bot for my channel, no cut and pasted code from other websites or scripts, This will be entirely done from scratch. I don't know if I can do it.. but I am going to try as both tyabblemons and his brother (waspmk3) have been telling me for over a week now that "Yes Mark, you are a programmer you just haven't realized it yet.." so maybe at heart I really am.
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