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I started coding in 1994 making .BAT menus for my DOS games. Used HELP.EXE to find commands I could use. Then I figured out how to modify and run GORILLA.BAS (using Q-Basic). Man, when I realized that all BASIC commands were in the OS documentation as well, that was the Red Pill! Just started to copy commands and blocks from the Gorillas game into a new program, read the doc, modify, run and learn. Btw, the first BASIC command I played with was "PLAY" (for music).
At that time I was 10 and there was no Stackoverflow, no Youtube, no tutorials, no Google... no easy path to follow down the rabbit hole.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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Back in school a class mate used a bat file to recursively create a directory an then enter it and repeat.
The directory also ended with ascii 255 which looks like a space and when placed at the end is invisible.
This was in msdos and there was no mouse or autocomplete, also no deleting of non empty directories.
The teacher finally gave up and admitted he could not solve it.
You had do make a new script first to traverse to the inner most dir, then recursively back trace removing directories.2 -
I just remember this short story:
When I was about 7 or 8 (around 1994), my dad had a computer at his office with MSDOS.
There I'd type "carmen.exe" and it would start "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?" or "pool.exe" would run a 2D Pool game I don't remember the exact name.
And yet, there was a "dolphin.exe" that I always thought it was a game but I never got it running. Obviously I don't remember what was the exact issue but to this day, 20+ years later it still bugs me to know what was this "dolphin.exe" program.4 -
That moment when you realize you're using a Hackintosh with VirtualBox and a CF card to install a Beta version of MS-DOS with DOS SHELL that your brother found on an old BBS forum; on an IBM 5150 from 1981.
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As someone who started with MSDOS 6.2, the idea that I can now put emojis in my directory names in Google Drive fascinates me way more than it should. I've never been able to find my files faster than now.2
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My very first computer had a bunch of CDs with tons of random freeware, shareware and demos. One of these happened to be an awesome graphics demo called Second Reality from Future Crew ( https://youtu.be/rFv7mHTf0nA check it out! ).
This demo was the reason I became addicted to programming back in the days and I started with QBasic, Power Basic, Pascal, assembler using MSDOS "debug" command (worst assembler out there!), and several strange C dialects like C-- (I found it hard to get hands on affordable compilers and totally missed Linux until several years later).
Delphi and Visual Basic accompanied me quite some time until I finally found the language which perfectly met my needs until today : C++
This was all way before I started to study ☺️
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It wasn't at the office but when I was in middle/high school I used to swap powerpoint with a shortcut batch file that would loop til the computer freezes or just write a file that straight crashes. I also did the one with the gif of matrix. Fun times and never got caught! XD
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A chess game on msdos
Pacman
Prince of persia
Eveeytime we go to my uncle's house he would get a game for me. Then I learned cd .. back and forth, dir format. I try to do the same for my nephew but he knows more about new games and better than me in pubg. I didn't loose my noob spirit. -
Started with Basic back in the early '90s, then tried quickBasic that came with the new version of msdos.
Later in the college we learned Pascal, Cobol, C and a little C++.
The languages I'm writing nowadays I've learned as I went... Most of them script languages as perl, php, python and bash. And C/C++ occasionally.
And js too1 -
Our first computer ran MSDOS. All I remember about it is playing "Wolf 3D" and this platform game I cannot recall the name of where you were in a land made of sweets. I could never remember the commands to start the games. Me and my Dad played Wolf and could never get past the guards with machine guns. My Mum used the PC for "word processing", I think she carried her work around on 5 inch floppy disks.3
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