I Was a 1980s Teenage Programmer

In a reflective blog post, Martijn Faassen shares his experiences as a teenage programmer in the 1980s, beginning with his first encounter with the Triumph Adler Alphatronic computer. Growing up in a small Dutch village, he recalls how his father, an accountant, introduced him to programming through BASIC, which was used to automate office tasks. Faassen describes the Alphatronic, equipped with an Intel 8085 CPU and running CP/M, as a pivotal part of his early programming journey. He reminisces about writing simple programs, including a basic calculator and a rudimentary AI that responded to input words with ASCII art.

Faassen highlights the challenges he faced as a young programmer, including language barriers and the limited resources available at the time, such as the absence of the Internet. He reflects on the magic of programming, where terms like "syntax error" and "function call" were initially mysterious but gradually became clearer as he learned. The post serves as a nostalgic look back at the early days of personal computing and programming, setting the stage for further exploration of his programming adventures in subsequent parts of the series.