h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thank you so much, Bossel!!! Your compilation is a superb documentation of a milestone in computing history.

May I add that I'm both: a Müslifresser and a Real Programmer.

Glad you liked it

I did my first steps in Fortran and was shown a card puncher which luckily was have taken out of service the other week, to be replaced by terminals with an aaaawful user interface. Working for more than 5 minutes on a screenful of data, without contacting the host, would log you out of it and invalidate all your work. Greek characters had to be looked up in tables, for example a 'phi' was row 17 column 12 in table 8, hence you had to type in something like @8;17;12 --- and print the page just to see if you had hit the greek or the chinese symbol table

My first program was called 'Endless Loop' and that was precisely what it did

Actually, I *learned* programming with Turbo Pascal&Assembler, and I'm counting myself into the pure Müsli-group

Well, nearly the same for me, but I started with Pascal on the mainframe. And COBOL for a living.

Turbo Pascal was my main programming language, before I had to switch to C (worst thing to happen to mankind) and now happily to Java.

But I once programmed the game Life on the Osborne with Z80 Assembler, and it was great.

Do you do any programming right now, Bossel?

I had three or four attempts at learning C, and lost interest soon each time. I simply can't *read* a C listing.

At the moment I'm programming for a HC12 micro-controller (used in a hobby project, for collecting data from a home-made radar model which is built around ultrasonic transmitters and receivers at 40kHz).

Good luck!

Do you plan to include a laser to shoot down the flies too?

Actually, I did play with that idea! But then I was afraid I might set the curtains on fire

Just a matter of good programming!