First program

by Julian Fletcher — last modified Wednesday Jul 30, 2008 06:48

— filed under: story, programming

My first programming experience, probably shares similar characteristics to many other people who started using computers

When

1982

Where

State middle school in the West Midlands, England

What

Wrote first computer program in BASIC on a white plastic Sinclair Z80.

The code went something like:

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"; 
20 GOTO 10 
RUN

The addition of the semicolon at the end of line 10 enabled the words "Hello world" to be displayed horizontally as well as vertically across the monitor screen. Its omission would just leave the text printed vertically.

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