Re-learning to program at 40 - The Early Years

SO... re-learning programming... at 40 ... well. What can I say? I have actually programmed before but started a long time ago in a little North Eastern town in Hartlepool, UK England.

I didn't do too well at school due to a mainly rough childhood and concentration issues at school. I went to a pretty rough school in Hartlepool, UK. It doesn’t exist anymore and has been knocked down and replaced with another school of another name on King Oswy drive.

It all started at the age of 16 when I left school in 1993. I didn't like school or the lessons but I always loved IT lessons. I loved anything to do with computers and how they worked amazed me. At the time I played mostly games on them but as I got close to leaving school I had to think about a career.

As I was leaving school I learnt that there was a computer programming Youth Training Scheme (YTS) called Information Technology and Enterprise Centre (ITEC) on Church Street. You had to attend 9am till 4pm and the taught you IT, office word processing etc and computer programming in Microsoft Quick Basic. They best thing about it ... they paid us £35 a WEEK!

The first few months at ITEC were a little boring as we learnt office applications, databases and MS Word 5.0 which ran on MS DOS. If you would like to try in on a web page go here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_microsoft_word5

It actually loads up on a web site using a DOS BOX web plug in. Its pretty cool and very old school.

Anyway. After we got that out of the way 4 long months had past but now it was time for MS QUICK BASIC

Quick Basic was a big learning curve for me at the time and with the help of our instructor we (our class of about 8 late teen boys) set to work on BASIC programs like 'Hello World', 'Bubble Sort's' and more complex stuff.

MALC THE CALC

Some times the concepts we covered was way over our head's but luckily we had a lad there called 'Malcolm Haire'. Malc was so GOOD at programming he seemed like he already knew all the stuff we were getting taught because he would finish his programming task in about 5% of the time it took us mere mortals. Also, Malc helped us a lot and we dubbed him with his new name 'Malc the Calc!' :)

Over time my personnel coding skills got better are better and I was able to create basic games like 'pong' and another called 'Letters' were colourful letters and numbers would slowly fall down the screen and you had to type them to kill them before they hit the bottom of the screen.

After a few months when most of our tutor's tasks and tests were complete our tutor interacted with us less and less and was hardly ever on our floor or in his office.

'When the cat is away the mice will play' ... this is when one of the lads 'Fergus' (Actual Pic above) introduced us to D&D the pen and paper role playing game! :)

He introduced our little group to anything from old School 'Dungeons' and Dragons' to 'Shadow Run'. We played RPG's all day long for weeks at a time with good old Fergus as the Dungeon Master (DM) who would dramatically describe our fantasy situations and listen to our crazy ideas how we would overcome any obstacle set before us lol. You may know that pen and paper RPG's require dice...

... lots and lots of dice. Dice of many shapes and sides. 4, 6, 10, 20, 50 sided dice, take your pick! You might be forgiven for thinking that all those dice that 8 frantic pubescent teenage boys were throwing about would make a lot of noise and maybe cause the tutor to catch us in the act. Well that’s were you would be wrong!

You see.. we coded the dice!

The computer program that was created and we each had a copy asked only 2 simple questions.

How many sides does you dice have? 20
How many times do you want to roll it? 2

You Rolled a 20 sided dice and rolled a 7
You Rolled a 20 sided dice and rolled a 15

I think the code went something like this:

SCREEN 0
CLS
RANDOMIZE TIMER

diceSides = 0
rolls = 0
randomNumber = 0
again$ = "y"

WHILE again$ = "y"
   INPUT "How many sides does your dice have?"; diceSides
   INPUT "How many times do you want to roll it?"; rolls
   FOR x = 1 to rolls
        randomNumber = int(rnd*diceSides)+1
        PRINT "You Rolled a "; diceSides; " sided dice and rolled a "; randomNumber
   NEXT x
   INPUT "Roll again? (y/n) "; again$
WEND
END

^^^^^Just typed this from memory. I actually impressed myself :)^^^^^

I am pretty sure that code above would work if you loaded quick basic through dos box right now. If you are that way inclined here are the links https://www.dosbox.com/ and https://winworldpc.com/product/quickbasic/45 give it a whirl and let me know if it works :)

The funny thing was, one of the other lads was caught cheating! He edited the program to cheat and add +2 to his dice rolls but was found out when 'Malc the Calc' spotted his dice rolled 22 on what should have only been a 20 sided dice! That was it! 'Malc the Calc' went to action creating his own Stand Alone Executable version of dice.bas DICE.EXE.

The programme dice.exe could not be edited and ran independent from QBASIC , all previous versions where deleted and cheating was stopped and many months of fun were had!

One of the most complicated programs I wrote while I was there was an encryption program that used a key and a file and encrypted and decrypted text data with ease.

Basically it got the ASCII values of the first letter of the key (which was looped through) and the first letter of text file and added them together until I reached the end of the file. This created new text file which was seemingly full of random letters numbers and symbols which could be decrypted latter but only if you had the key :) Probably the smartest program I have ever created.

I got in trouble when the tutor noticed I had encrypting the windows 3.1 system settings files which were in plain text back in the days of 1994 but luckily I manged to decrypt it back using the key :)

All that happened 25 years ago and I look back on that time as fun, creative, social experience of my youth .

Throughout my life up until now I have been married twice, have 2 kids from my first ex wife had a career in the military and a career in retail fixing tills, had 2 dogs (1st is dead seconds has 3 legs and ran away with my 2nd ex wife). During this busy time, when I am was not eating, sleeping, gaming or working , I occasionally attempted to get back into programming. I have tried various languages like C++, C#, Java and various other various of BASIC and even gaming IDE's like Unity 3D but I have always given up or became demotivated or stopped short of my goal. Some how that goal has to be make a game and get better at making games.

Recently my brother has been coding in PYTHON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language) as he is making a bot for his crypto trading on the Bittrex Exchange using API calls. Like me he has got back into programming and is now motivated by the notion that one day he may become financially free and life the life he always wanted. (I know what he's coding and I want a copy of the bot! lol) But I wont be making a bot (Ill just steal his for my Crypto lol).

I will be using python and trying to recreate some of the programs like the encryption one I made and the small games with the eventual aim to making a good game. I'm in no rush I just want to enjoy the creative experience and learn and get into the zone. I will also be streaming my coding with some nice music live on

so make sure you follow me there and on here at steamit.

So ...at 40. I feel that I am half way through my life. So my cup is half full and by the time I get to the end of my life I want the cup to keep filing will interesting and creative things.

So join me in my journey in which I will try and recapture the MAGIC of CODE and share the discovery and journey on here. Please upvote, follow and resteam.