What Was Your First Programming Language?

[Dave Britten]

Probably a dash of BASIC on our Commodore 64 when I was about 6 or 7. I didn't really start getting into programming until Q-BASIC in my dad's Zenith SuperSport 286 laptop. I didn't really have any instructional books; I still remember the light in my head going on one afternoon when I realized that incrementing a score counter was a simple as 'P=P+1'.

Never did anything too fancy with Q-BASIC. I did a great deal of making variously horrible and humorous games in ZZT, which is essentially the 2D MS-DOS predecessor to Unreal Engine. I highly recommend checking it out, even today.

Appropriately enough, it was the TI-82 I got around age 13 where I really started to take off. I was frequently wrestling with the 24 KB user RAM area on that, and later on my TI-83, on account of writing so many games and other utilities.