The first programming language that I learned was BASIC. I have my father to thank for this, who introduced me to programming when I was seven years old. He showed me all sorts of neat things that we could do on the Commodore Vic20, which had a BASIC interpreter built in. I remember having a lot of fun sitting down with him in front of the computer and writing a "Mastermind" game.
None of what I did on the Vic20 (and later the C64) is here. There was nothing great there anyway, as I was just learning the elemental concepts of programming at that time. Later though, when I purchased a PC running "MS-DOS 3.2", I continued to work in BASIC. First I used the interpreter "GWBASIC" and then the interpreter/compiler "Quickbasic". It is under "Quickbasic" that I developed the work shown here.
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This is the first full sized game I ever wrote. I wrote it because
I thoroughly enjoyed playing the original "Lode Runner" on the Apple II-e we had in
the gradeschool I went to, but hadn't been able to find it anywhere else. I added
several different features to it, which I found enhanced the game quite nicely.
It also got very thoroughly tested in high school when one of the teachers was kind
enough to place it on the network she maintained, allowing other students to play it.
(and play it they did!) The worst problem with this game was the fact that I
wrote it with BASIC, leaving me with a very limited graphics library. Also,
the compiler I used, Quickbasic, was crippled when the program got too big. So
it stopped getting developed at that point.|
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My version of Tank Wars. It was assigned to me as a project in a high
school computer programming course. I spent most the semester writing
that game and had a whale of a time doing so. It too wound up being
very thoroughly tested by many other students. Having been written in
BASIC, and also one of my earlier projects, it isn't anything fantastic.
It was pretty fun to play though, and a lot of fun to write.|
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When I was in high school, I and a good friend of mine discovered
screen savers (bear in mind that these were a new concept at that point).
We both thought they would be fun to write and did so. This program demonstrates
some of the ones that I wrote.|
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This is a simple desktop GUI
that I wrote for MS-DOS. I wrote this because I did not care for "Windows 3.1",
but wanted a simple GUI that I could use. Rather than using a window-based
interface, it uses multiple desktops to group icons. It's nothing at all great
going by today's standards, but was pretty darned good in it's day.
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When I studied OAC calculus
in high school, we had to do an "independent study" to complete the course.
For mine, I developed two pieces of software that applied to the field. This
first one is a simple interface that would let you enter a pre-formatted function,
and would return the derivative of that function.
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This is the second program that I wrote for my independent study in OAC
calculus. This one will let you define a two-dimensional curve in various
formats, and then animate the tangent of that curve interactively.