Too funny. The 2600 basic programming cartridge to Atari 800 basic constituted my entry into the world of programming as well. At first, I had no tape drive and no disk drive, so you'd type in a program (usually from a magazine), play with it for a while and then press the reset button and start all over again. The best would be when a program listing had a whole bunch of assembly code that you would 'poke' into some address. You'd be typing in a huge string of gibberish and if there was one typo, nothing would happen when you ran program. Or if you were really lucky, you'd get some garbage displayed on the screen.
I wouldn't trade that early experience for anything.
Skinner on April 21, 2008 04:04 PM