My first programming was at Manchester Poly using Fortran. We had to hand punch cards and leave them with a technician to be run and then collect the results next day. The only alternative then was my trusty Thornton P221 Comprehensive Log Log Slide Rule.
In my early days at work I had adventures with an HP 9825 and a pen plotter. I was intent on building bike frames and wrote a program to plot out patterns which when wrapped around a tube would provide a template to cut to so that two tubes would meet perfectly. I also mass produced my Christmas cards on the HP plotter one year.
My next venture into Basic was with a Commodore PET in my lunchtimes.
My first home computer was a second hand ZX81 which didn't work properly - random characters kept popping up on screen - the guy I bought it off was reluctant to give me a refund saying it had always done that - never thinking that there had been a fault.
I went upmarket then with an Acorn ATOM which had 2K RAM. I bought some surplus boards (where have all the shops gone that used to sell such stuff?) and desoldered the memory chips to expand the ATOM to all of 12K.
I only had the ATOM for a couple of weeks when I was offered a BBC model B. BBC Basic probably still is the best. I designed and built a flat bed pen plotter to use with the BEEB which could even be used to list out programs. The program was all in BASIC and worked remarkably fast considering the speed of the processor. (1MHz). Someone at work bought a Watford DDFS interface which was soon cloned and this gave me access to the luxury of 3.5" Floppies rather than the tedious cassette. Another lunchtime project was making sideways RAM boards into which you could load ROM images from the floppy drive. The program to run the sideways RAM was a mixture of Basic and machine code.
Jumping forward to the 21st century and BBC Basic is very much alive and well and is available to run on Windows (up to and including 8.1) and Linux. There is a free version of BBC Basic for Windows (limited to 16K programs) or for £29.99 you can use up to 256Mb and compile your programs into executables. This is on my list of to-dos as I wrote dozens of programmes to do all sorts of engineering calculations. See
http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcwin/bbcwin.htmlI still have 2 BBC Model Bs and a BBC B+ with 64K memory. I suspect none of them would switch on without replacing a few capacitors having been unused for so many years. I do miss the virtually instant start-up and occasionally hanker after playing Repton.
I'm sure that having limited memory forced people into writing efficient code. Many years ago a colleague and I developed a document management system which used VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) to interface Autocad with Excel. A bizarre feature was that you could write a few hundred lines of program and then find a function which could reduce the job to say 10 lines. You would imagine that the file containing the VBA would then be smaller as a result of losing 90 lines. Not so - our friends at Microsoft for some unknown reason never actually deleted anything you wrote even though you thought you'd got rid of it! Thus your more efficient programme was in fact bigger than the less efficient one. You couldn't access the deleted stuff in History so why keep it? The only way round this was to export the modules one by one in to a new project. It made me wonder if all Microsoft software was the same.
Phil.