1- My first program

This is my first computer, kind of because I can’t really remember how it looks like, at least I know it was a Vtech.

When I was around 5, my parents bought me a kid computer, so that I can have fun and play some educational games. Those computers were very popular, you could learn math, orthograph, geography etc… The screen was crappy, the sound too.

So now you are wondering, the title is My first program, you can’t write program with a kids computer right?

I still don’t really know why, but at the time, some kid computers were capable of running a BASIC emulator. This is what my dad use to show me how to write my first program.
It is very blury because I was very young (and my dad don’t really remember either…), but I think this program was printing the alphabet in a loop.

When I discovered that, I remember that I was not playing any game anymore, I was just trying to program my alphabet loop again ang again because we did not have any floppy to save to (you needed to buy some proprietary stuff), so I was loosing everything everytime I shutdown the computer.

After some research, turns out this was a light version of BASIC that was on those computers, PRE-BASIC 1.0. If you are curious you can find some information here.

So I guess I was writing something like:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27

10 PRINT("A")
20 PRINT("B")
30 PRINT("C")
40 PRINT("D")
50 PRINT("E")
60 PRINT("F")
70 PRINT("G")
80 PRINT("H")
90 PRINT("I")
100 PRINT("J")
110 PRINT("K")
120 PRINT("L")
130 PRINT("M")
140 PRINT("N")
150 PRINT("O")
160 PRINT("P")
170 PRINT("Q")
180 PRINT("R")
190 PRINT("S")
200 PRINT("T")
210 PRINT("U")
220 PRINT("V")
230 PRINT("W")
240 PRINT("X")
250 PRINT("Y")
260 PRINT("Z")
260 GOTO 10

And no, I did not write all of it this time :)

1

for(let i=0;i<26;i++) { console.log(`${(i+1)*10} PRINT("${String.fromCharCode(i+65)}")`)}

I read this amazing article that is talking about the kids computers and BASIC.

I think that is where it all began.