[Freddy]

..the film.  It was on here last night and I watched it for old times sake.  Anyone else seen it recently ?

I was amazed by how dated the technology looked...acoustic couplers, command line interfaces, green screen displays and no hint of Windows or Microsoft...but still a good film.  Portable PC's that were the size of televisions, even the massive visual displays looked old and I remember thinking they were amazing back in 1983. 

[GamerThom]

Sounds like the first computer I had access to back in college when I took my first course
in computer science and basic programming. That was in 1980. The monitors were big
clunky crt's that displayed white on a sickly green field. But what I first started learning on
wasn't a portable, it was a keyboard tied into a big old IBM mainframe with everything
printed out by a dot-matrix printer so that before they'd let us run our program code, we'd
have to show it to the instructor for approval while dissecting & explaining it line by line.
Very time consuming and tedious at the least. Good thing we only had to code things
containing not more than 500 lines or I would still be there going through it all, all those
"If","then","Let" and "Goto" statements could drive a person absolutely batty when you had
to explain the reason for each one and why you chose to put it in this line and not somewhere
else.   

The one I worked with after that wasn't much better, but at least it was portable. I did
mathematical modelling using the first CadCam software on an old TRS 80. That at least
had a black screen with white print, so looking at it didn't make me nauseous after a few
hours. 

[Maviarab]

Hehe aye great...classic stuff from young Mr Bueller...

[Freddy]

Yes, it was still an enjoyable film 

Tom, yes I remember using a mainframe briefly, but I just got in on computers when they started to hit the home market and mostly used a BBC B Micro (not sure if they had them in the US).  But I also remember being shown an old Osbourne (I think) computer with an even grosser bright orange display...this machine was meant to be portable but was akin to travelling around with a large and heavy briefcase filled with bricks.

GOTO commands ?  You were so lucky we were allowed GOSUBs but GOTOs were banned and frowned upon lol.

[Maviarab]

travelling around with a large and heavy briefcase filled with bricks

  hehe, nicely worded

[GamerThom]

Oh don't think I got off that easy. We used "gosub" for some routine's. We're talking about the
very first form of BASIC here, and don't even get me started about Binary, all those one's and
zero's and then there was translating commands for programming in hexadecimal - Aaaaaarrrrrgh! 

I think I've seen "WarGames" once or twice, actor's real name was Matthew Broderick. 

[GT40]

10 INPUT "Do you like computers (Y/N)"; A$
20 IF A$ = "Y" THEN GOSUB 70
30 ELSE PRINT "You don't know what you loose!"
40 END
70 PRINT "I think it's because of THIS GIRL."
80 RETURN
90 REM I just want to say I loved Ally Sheedy.


Nostalgia... 

[GamerThom]

Lol!      You just had to toss that in here didn't you GT40?   

[GT40]

Sorry for this crisis of nostalgia.

Nostalgia because with Basic, ordinary people like me could feel a great sensation of power. And had the illusion they totally took control of the machine, with their genius ten lines of code. I am the king of the world! 

Nostalgia because with GOTO, my ugly little programs ran perfectly. Thank you GOTO. 

Nostalgia because I don't understand anything to Visual Basic. Maybe I am too lazy to learn it. 

[Freddy]

Hehe, thats a neat program!

Visual Basic is not BASIC anymore, it's become this wierd hybrid of a programming language.  I used to hate it, but the more I use it the better I find it.  Most VB programs have more comments in them than code these days, because it is getting increasingly more difficult to understand.

The only reason I think GOTO's were banned was because the teacher wanted an easy read!

[GamerThom]

Yep! I'm sitting here right now waiting for a delivery of books to come.
There's a half dozen on Visual Basic 6 and one for Python. 

I thought I was done with all the heavy learning when I finished college oh so long ago. 

[Freddy]

hehe, I found the newer VBExpress was a bit of an up hill climb and was by far the most difficult time I have ever had understanding how something works in any programming language.

I wish you luck in your studies , VB6 is a lot kinder I think and also more traditional.  My latest jaunt into new programming has been PHP and SQL, both I found very nice to work with and a lot easier to learn than VBExpress.

[GamerThom]

I know what you mean about VB Express. I've been struggling with the blasted thing
for over 6 months now and am no further along with it than I was 5 months ago.   

I'm pretty sure that microsoft goes out of its way to make things deliberately confusing.

[Freddy]

Yeah that sounds very familiar...the online documentation is poor too, most people seem to feel the same way as a lot of the help pages get really low ratings.  It was worth the struggle for me though so I would say stick with it, you'll get there in the end.