What Was Your First Programming Language?

[jebem]

(07-07-2015 04:25 AM)Katie Wasserman Wrote:  I learned Forth from reading Dr. Dobb's Journal (DDJ). DDJ was incredibly geeky but they published full program listings and long articles and you could learn a lot from reading it.

Oh, what found memories I have from these times!

The DDJ was sold here in Lisbon as well in the good old days and I still have a few copies in the basement.
It was an amazing reading, fantastic article authors, highly technical content, I've learned a lot from it.

I leaned Forth on a British Sinclair ZX Spectrum (gaming machine) based on a Z80 cpu in the 80's.

The Sinclair was extremely popular in Portugal because it was primarily a good cheap machine for games sold on tape (cassette) media format.

People used to "share" the games by copying them from tape recorder to tape recorders, until game developers decided to protect their intellectual property by using several techniques to make the copied tape useless.

The last iteration of the ZX game protection was very efficient, so the bigger the challenge, the bigger was my curiosity to find out how to bypass the protection mechanism.
So, just for fun, I developed a hardware sub-system with 64 KB of static RAM that would replace the ROM OS entirely and have modified the NMI routine just a bit to call my memory dump routine to transfer the previously loaded game into a tape media.
It was great fun indeed!
And I could run any copied game, no matter how much protection it had.

Needless to say, I did it just for my personal use, as a backup mechanism of my precious games.

Edited to correct a few typos.