What Was Your First Programming Language?

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

I'm not sure these are considered languages or operating systems.

Back in the 70's at Indiana University, I was exposed to CDC Plato education system. Then in the 80's my girlfriend worked for a couple of interesting companies.

First was CDC in the Plato group. She would let me go in after hours and on weekends and play with the Plato system Of course most of my time was spent playing a multiuser version of a real-time version of star wars. It was a lot of fun.

A few years later, she went to work at Metaphor Computer Systems. This company was started by David Liddle, one of the Xerox PARC people. Again, after hours, I was allowed to play around with the system The workstations all had wireless mice and keyboards, and the GUI was a lot like the Xerox Star system. The company provided database services for the average executive. You could drag and drop pieces of a database into a tree like structure and the system would create the SQL inquiry to generate a beautiful report from the database. It was really easy to do. Beautiful system, but a little slow. Would be interesting to see how it would perform on todays hardware. Since they were competing with IBM's database software, IBM bought the company only for the database stuff, and then closed down the hardware piece.

Bill
Smithville, NJ