OSDev.org

Solar wrote: Kieran... allow me to voice doubt in you programming at an age when most kids have trouble reading. ???

I actually was introduced to programming at around age 6/7. albeit, in Basic, and a very superfical level, understanding that a computer can store and access values. Programs like:-

"Hello, wot is yout name?"
>David
"Hello, David! How are you today?"

Alghtough i didn't really progress from that stage until I was about 11/12, when I could copy simple program listings out of magazines, and analyse the code.

But you know....It reminds me of learning to play an instrument. I started playing the paino at around age 8, and played solidly until I went to uni 4 years ago. That still didn't make me a better player than some of my friends, who had only been playing for 2-3 years

So it doesn't make any difference how old you are when you start, or how long you've been doing it... It just boils down to how quickly you understand the concepts, how much work you put it, and mostly a big portion of natural ability and gift.

I started on about my 7th programming in visual basic in excel , a year later i got logo from somebody, dunno how long i used it, then i went back to vb again, and then i began to learn c, c++, i've done a bit pascal (didn't like it, so actually never learned it really) and assemble code. I'm 14 now, and working on my own OS, from bug to bug .

@ whyme_t:

Oh... the "Hello <insert your name>" stage... OK, I thought we were talking about programming here. Like, problem - concept - solution.

I was about 14 (plusminus a year) when I wrote an attendancy tracker for our local Judo club. C128 BASIC 7.0, relative file database, ~120 names tracked across six training sessions a week, including formatted printout and statistics on "most attended this month" and "not attended in X weeks". Fully functional and used for over a year. (Eventually replaced by an Excel sheet. ::) )

Typing off programs from the handbook, I did that on a ZX-81 in what, 1982? That would make me 10, then. One year later I tried to get the tank from the example prog (which could move in one direction, controlled by a for loop) to move in any direction, controlled by cursor keys, and shoot. Failed because of RAM constraints (1kB)... and still wouldn't call that "programming".

Kieran, if I do you injustice, I humbly apologize. But I find it really hard to picture a six-year-old doing anything requiring that much of analytical thinking and attention span. I know a boy of seven who plays his dad at backgammon occassionally, but they play with fewer stones and only when he has a really good day...

Solar wrote: Oh... the "Hello <insert your name>" stage... OK, I thought we were talking about programming here. Like, problem - concept - solution.

Ah... but one must learn to program, by programming, before one can program :p (and even this is a recursive loop...)

And although the simple Hello $Name program isn't an amazing programming example, it easily becomes the "enter 2 numbers to find the sum" to "draw a Christmas tree with nested for loops" (which is well on the way to problem solving with constraints).

Personally, I don't think I was an 'ok' programmer until perhaps during my GCSEs, and a 'compotant' one till A-levels. (Surprisingly, I didn't learn anything at uni, which I hadn't learnt at this point already)

whyme_t wrote:
And although the simple Hello $Name program isn't an amazing programming example, it easily becomes the "enter 2 numbers to find the sum" to "draw a Christmas tree with nested for loops" (which is well on the way to problem solving with constraints).

Yep... and somewhere along the path ends "mimicking" and starts "programming".

Personally, I don't think I was an 'ok' programmer until perhaps during my GCSEs, and a 'compotant' one till A-levels.

I don't think I was an 'ok' programmer until my late twenties, as I was never under the pressure to work in a team or maintain a program beyond it's initial usefullness. And I'm happy that none of my source code from that era survived.

(Surprisingly, I didn't learn anything at uni, which I hadn't learnt at this point already)

You find that surprising?

Solar wrote: You find that surprising?

Maybe just bitter and disappointed If I hadn't gone to uni, I could have worked my way up into a decent job by now, instead of facing the old dilemma of not having enough experience to do the kind of jobs I want

i am 15 now, and i am an excellent programmer (Though my englis sux) i have won 1st place for the c++/c regional and state FBLA(feture business leaders of america) and for the internaional, and national event iv won 2ed place to a 13 y/o freashman boath times i bielive that if ones parents can teach the child to read at about 4 or 5(like me), write and has a natural gift of mathamatics and logical problem solving, the child has every capability to be an avarage programmer at 6,7 or about 8.

i do find it hard to bieliev asweal, but when u analyze the posibilities, it is extreamly possibal.

ps. i could do html code and design personal websites when i was 6.

since i was 4 baby ;P (w/ basic and @ 12 i went VB and 14 i went C/ASM)

beyond infinity wrote: Ha - at six, I've been more eager to learn how to ride my bike, and at fourteen, my da 's put me behind the steering wheel of his car and showed me how to drive. *chuckle* Computing 's had a place in my life then, but it's not been on a high priority. Mountain biking 's had a High Priority. *gg*

At 5, I learned to ride a bike. Then, I learned to play games on my C64. At 7, I had a game which crashed continually and I figured, why not check out the listing and try to modify some things. Main result was that it crashed earlier, but not with syntax errors (mainly because the game was kind of complex for a 7-year old). At 8 or so I had my dad/mom type over something from the book to then meddle with to see what I could make it do (not too much fantasy back then). At around 9-10 I tried to make my own game with sprites and text mode "background". Couldn't completely figure out what I was doing wrong but the sprites occasionally showed as pure crap and I could not get them to look nice in 4-color mode (probably due to my drawing skills at that time). Around 11-12 I had moved to gwbasic and was trying to learn better & more complex stuff, but couldn't.

Around 13 or so I moved to qbasic (since everybody apparently dumped gwbasic). I got hooked on mode13 and stuff like that, palette reprogramming (see also smallfade, a fader I made in 492 bytes of code that qualitatively beats the hell out of most faders). Then, I set out on my graphics-quest. I wanted really good graphics in qbasic, plus mouse support and if I could sound (didn't make that though). That got me hooked on assembly level information, I manually compiled most qbasic-code-fragments and they pretty much always worked out of the box. First few tries I got it very slowly running and then I started figuring out what made the program slow (hence, sparking interest in optimization problems). After minimizing the 4f05 calls I got it to a near-acceptable speed. Then, I set out for graphical effects and windowing.

At that time I pretty much found out the hard way that qbasic doesn't have a dynamic malloc nor classes. I learned a little bit of C++ and a little of C, to then expand my C knowledge by working together with [Term] on the RaptorIRCD. Which worked pretty nicely though. I tried to do some work for ReactOS, but after having it nearly done and then seeing my HD crash without backup I couldn't be convinced to remake it (hence, I didn't make the mouse driver for them, even though there are some sites that still claim I did). I considered starting my own project a few years before that, but didn't actually get any details laid down.

Got the indispensable pc hardware book for my 16th birth day (no, no motor cycle or anything). Started designing the OS, thinking up ideas and occasionally trying out something with qbasic for help. Nothing significant though, aside from trying out some graphical stuff in my own environment. I then set out to graduate from school and go to uni. I did such and after 1.5 years at uni I really started coding atlantisos. It pretty much followed the design until 0.0.1 was done and I figured ramming paging in was going to be pretty much a rewrite. Hence, I rewrote it, and published 0.0.2. It got two minor updates to small parts of it and I'm still actively working on 0.0.3 which I want to make support modules that can be loaded at runtime, and unloaded too. However, I am now in a state where it's almost in testing but where I haven't done anything about it for too long and I can't make any time available soon. I'm going to thus finish uni first so I can then spend all time I have left on this stuff. Probably going to spend about 10-20 hours a week between july and february 2006, and then anywhere between 10 and 60 hours a week, depending on whether I can get a job before september (masters).

That's pretty much the story of my life. Anyone else care to tell theirs?

Kind of sad.. Hardly fill up a computerscreen with your life story.. ;D

So we almost all started young (more or less depending on the current age and the initial appearance of the C64 on the market and hobbies )

But it seems youngers don't much reply to threads ...

Hi,

I'm 31 & started tinkering with BASIC on a VIC20 when I was 8. Moved onto Commodore 64's not long after. Learnt 6502 machine language while trying to write games (BASIC was far too slow). Didn't have an assembler and doing it by hand is too much work for anything more than small routines, so I wrote my own assembler in BASIC then converted it to itself (and then wrote a utility to convert binaries into assembly source code).

I started OS dev when I bought a top of the line 80486DX33 with 8 Mb of memory and didn't like Win3.1 . First OS I wrote was a real mode thing where the BIOS handled the devices and one big binary did booting, kernel and all applications (it didn't use a file system - files stored directly in sectors on the floppy without directories, etc). That was back before I had internet access (before 99% of people had it) - the public library wasn't exactly a great source of programming information.

Getting internet access was a huge eye-opener - found out all about protected mode and even got Intel's manuals! Started writing protected mode OS's (about 20 of them), each more complex than the last.

I am actually a licenced electrical contractor (not just an electrical worker), have a security licence that allows me to conduct business installing security alarms, am a registered telecommunications cabler and a registered Telstra sub-contractor. I ran my own cabling business for 5 years (1 employee, van, tools, quotes, invoices, contracts, etc), but spent too much time programming. I closed the business down at the end of last year - not enough profit and too many hassles (competing against unlicenced unemployed people doing cash in hand jobs who don't have to worry about GST, insurance, superannuation, workcover, etc doesn't help).

During the first half of this year I'm doing Certificate III and Certificate IV in Information Technology, followed by an associate diploma starting in the second half. I get RPL (recognised prior learning) for part of it, and the certificate III/IV counts towards the associate diploma (which can't be done locally).

I've reached the stage where my OS design can't have more features, and I'm doing it as a "commercial quality" project (rather than as a hobbyist thing). By the time I complete the associate diploma my OS should be functional and I'll be looking for research grants, donations, investors, etc.


Cheers,

Brendan

I didn't start young, relative to everyone else. I played my share of PC games through most of my teenage years but then around age 17 decided it would be fun to try and write games instead. I learned BASIC in summer school before my final high school year, then learned Pascal. I went to university and learned C, C++, x86 asm, Java, and a bunch of other languages there. Not long after starting out there, I decided that OSes were more interesting than games... or maybe I was just scared of linear algebra.

I don't think I would describe myself as a programmer. My CS teacher in my final year of high school gave me the book "Code Complete," which taught me to do things "The Right Way" from the very start. My degree is a CS degree, but with a specialization in Software Engineering. Even at work I'm regarded as being very "process-oriented".

I use to have this game (qbasic) where you threw bannanas at the enemy monkey. I wanted desperatly how it worked. my first programs where glorified "hello world" things and "password" things that my dad showed me. soon i discovered the help command (ohhhh, ahhhh) and i unlocked the entire language.

about 13, i learned VB and i began doing GFX.

Dragon_Hilord wrote: I use to have this game (qbasic) where you threw bannanas at the enemy monkey. I wanted desperatly how it worked. my first programs where glorified "hello world" things and "password" things that my dad showed me. soon i discovered the help command (ohhhh, ahhhh) and i unlocked the entire language.

AAah ... Gorrillas ... it sure unleashed the sprite-power of my QuickBasic copy ... I think that's where i discovered how to cut&paste video memory regions that finally led to Bilou's adventure and Bilou's Quest