Elite 1984 inspired you? 6502 anyone?

[Porina]

I was a bit on the young side for programming during my encounter with original Elite and the BBC B. I did dabble in BASIC on that, and later the Spectrum, but didn't get anywhere with either. I have ended up doing some programming as part of work, mostly C derivatives and some VisualBasic in the past. I'm a hardware engineer that can do some programming, and I wouldn't consider myself a programmer in any useful sense

 

[Para Handy]

Started assembler writing for 8080 - stayed with the intel family mainly but did some 6502 on my own as a hobby with my Beeb.

 

[ShadowWolf Kell]

Dabbled in 6502 as well as 68000. 6502 is nothing. When I got into college during the Pascal heydey and the advent of C, they were still teaching Kobol and Fortran classes on a PDP 1170. I was the PDP Lab manager for awhile while going to school.

 

[Wotthe Dickens]

Great paths! Thank you all for posting.
I hope, but I don't know if ED 2016 will inspire any budding coders or game designers today.
Perhaps it's more the job of the small mobile games which hold that space where 2 students could get a game published...
In the light of morning (sans la vin), I feel a bit daft being so retrospective, but your posts are fun to read!
Cheers guys

 

[Blairvoyach]

10 print "hello world"
20 Goto 10

And thus my career in welding was born!

 

[Kitty]

One story, I really must share with you - for you programmers.

My Dad started programming on the ZX81 using Basic. He spent hours typing in some code from a magazine, but just couldn't get it to work. It threw up syntax error after syntax error, so he went through and deleted all of those lines that produced an error. Finally after a long session at that plastic membrane keyboard, he finally got it to work.

The program didn't do anything as every line that was left, contained a REM statement describing the code.

Those were the days!!

Kitty

 

[EdzUp]

Kitty I sure hope it wasnt one of my listings had several published under EdzUp back in the day been using that moniker for years now

 

[Wotthe Dickens]

One story, I really must share with you - for you programmers.

My Dad started programming on the ZX81 using Basic. He spent hours typing in some code from a magazine, but just couldn't get it to work. It threw up syntax error after syntax error, so he went through and deleted all of those lines that produced an error. Finally after a long session at that plastic membrane keyboard, he finally got it to work.

The program didn't do anything as every line that was left, contained a REM statement describing the code.

Those were the days!!

Kitty

Lol, yeah! I learnt to program by fixing the typos in the listings in Byte magazine.

 

[AceFlares]

Unfortunately I'm not as brainy as the OP! However, The ZX Spectrum 48K got me into BASIC at home and the BBC B in school. Years later in my mid 20s I was given an Amiga 500+. The old interest rekindled and I spent a few years as an IBM AS400/RPG400 Analyst Programmer which although quite lucrative, I found incredibly boring! The long commutes and stays away eventually ground away and I left IT altogether..

 

[askavir]

I was far too young to play the 1984 Elite, I only started playing the Elite: Frontier on my Commodore Amiga.

Can't really say that it was Elite (or any game) that kickstarted my career, it was the Amiga computer which really sparked my enthusiasm for computing. The dawn of the internet age was fuel to the fire, as I always loved machine communications and generally distributed computing and making systems talk and cooperate with one another.

Although I work in a game development company (Miniclip), I am not a game developer per se, as I work on servers development for multiplayer games.

 

[Anson22]

It would be wrong to say that the ZX Spectrum got me into programming. I did do some coding on the preceding ZX81 but never got into it seriously. My move into coding was more work related and the changes in technology over the years. Sometime in the mid-1990's they took away my soldering iron and gave me a computer to play with instead. I self taught Visual Basic, HTML, ASP, SQL, etc. and spent a happy ten years coding. Then the company took the development toys away from me and insisted that I act as ASG/Customer Liaison for my app's - development was given to contractors. I still get to query the database for adhoc info and to provide design info to our developers. I also get to play with our Linux boxes but coding has become a thing of the past for me.

 

[Kitty]

Unfortunately I'm not as brainy as the OP!

Everyone is brainy in their own way. All you need to do is to find out where you excel. For me it is patterns and logic. I can see algorithms as pictures in my head. When it comes to maths I am completely useless; these folks are the brainy ones to me, and I am really dumb. So its a road of discovery throughout life. Find your talent early on in life is the key. Never give up.

 

[smiths121]

I think i was destined to be geeky and pursue a technology career before Elite. The split mode of BBC Elite inspired me to learn about interrupts in the day - almost directly usable for back part of writing device drivers. Alas today the "manager" appears in my job title and hand on coding is a thing of the past..... sniff.

I would like to add contrary to firm held view by others Revs did not influence my driving style at all......


Simon

 

[William J Smith]

Calculating how many T states of instructions you could in get during flyback?

Not quite.

Timing how long each interupt cycle could have on the CPU with the total amount of time allowed for all interupts being 60 mSecs,with the remaining time running the controlling program.
music was a set one, keyboard/joystick scanning was a set time, and animation being a set time.... however , there was a subtle bug that ment somewhere in there the processing time for all interupts rose to 70mSec, which was beyond the 65 mSec main interupt............. so the interupts would arrive before the previous one had finished.. and then the stack would grow very fast and wipe the memory before I could even get a debugger in there.
And of course, it would never happen on a single static run of each interrupt routine.

Ended up having to work out how many clock cycles each path through the code was using... aarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhhh.

Still... stood me in good stead for passing the open universities "M301: Concurrent and distributed systems design" module ... a course that was feared when it was introduced... [woah]

Bill

<<is far smarter than he first appears [alien]

 

[Wotthe Dickens]

Unfortunately I'm not as brainy as the OP! However, The ZX Spectrum 48K got me into BASIC at home and the BBC B in school. Years later in my mid 20s I was given an Amiga 500+. The old interest rekindled and I spent a few years as an IBM AS400/RPG400 Analyst Programmer which although quite lucrative, I found incredibly boring! The long commutes and stays away eventually ground away and I left IT altogether..

As Kitty says and we're all wired differently and there's no right nor wrong.
Congrats on leaving the rat race, quality of life is far more important than cash in the bank.
Nice to hear peoples tales, thanks all - cheers

 

[Khelder]

I was programming a little before I got my hands on Elite. I started very young as well, but most of the early years I was using BASIC. I didn't really touch assembly until around 80386 period. I loved my BBC Micro B. I did soo much on that thing. Apart from a bit of initial encouragement from my father (as well as him funding things), I'm completely self-taught too. So many different languages. So many different technologies. But C# is my favourite.

Although the original Elite did not necessarily inspire me, Elite: Dangerous (and the many third-party app developers out there) did inspire me to start writing my own third-party app for this game. It's the first time since I was a kid that my coding has touched anything close to game-related. I am enjoying it so much!

 

[DanTheMan]

I was an IBM Customer engineer back then.
I also had the predecessor to the BBC-Micro (the Acorn Atom) home-build kit also a 6502 driven machine, with a massive 1K of RAM, inbuilt assembler and tape interface.
Still got both machines packed away in my attic.

 

[Wotthe Dickens]

.... Elite: Dangerous (and the many third-party app developers out there) did inspire me to start writing my own third-party app for this game. It's the first time since I was a kid that my coding has touched anything close to game-related. I am enjoying it so much!

Awesome!

I was an IBM Customer engineer back then.
I also had the predecessor to the BBC-Micro (the Acorn Atom) home-build kit also a 6502 driven machine, with a massive 1K of RAM, inbuilt assembler and tape interface.
Still got both machines packed away in my attic.

I got my Acorn Atom out recently but realised I haven't got a UHF tv, nor tape machine at the moment and then started to think that actually I'll be better off sticking to an emulator if the hankering got too strong anyway
Back into the attic...
Edit: actually, the arduino fills quite a gap

 

[twelvebore]

I got my Acorn Atom out recently but realised I haven't got a UHF tv, nor tape machine at the moment and then started to think that actually I'll be better off sticking to an emulator if the hankering got too strong anyway

My mother-in-law rescued a BBC Micro from a skip, complete with Cumana 5.25" disc drive and a bunch of games. She's given it to me, but like you I realised that I've not got anything to plug it in to! Whether the RGB monitor output on the Beeb can be persuaded to drive a VGA monitor I'm not sure. Just the feel of the old keyboard brought back so many memories.

 

[Wotthe Dickens]

My mother-in-law rescued a BBC Micro from a skip, complete with Cumana 5.25" disc drive and a bunch of games. She's given it to me, but like you I realised that I've not got anything to plug it in to! Whether the RGB monitor output on the Beeb can be persuaded to drive a VGA monitor I'm not sure. Just the feel of the old keyboard brought back so many memories.

Wow, that's some mother in law
I know there's cheap kit to go vga2uhf but dunno the other way..