Somebody on the interwebs said we could all talk about our first C programs when Dennis Ritchie died. This was supposed to be my rant. It was stuck in ‘draft’ for 2 years and would not have moved forward had it not been for the spammers who messed with my old wordpress installation and started sending mails in my name.
My first C program was written on a notebook (and was never compiled or run). Pascal was my swiss army knife when I was in my 11th standard (after qualifying from BASIC). Around that time my uncle got me a small book (no it was not K&R). All the talk about ‘C’ and its power that I read in electronics for you magazine got me buzzed. Unfortunately the school computer lab had just 8086 (PC-XT)s with two 5.25″ FDDs at the best. No C compiler anywhere to be seen. So it was “translated” versions of couple of my pascal programs in a red notebook book (hand written) for a long time. Till around end of 12th I got my hands on unc’s 486 DX2 (66 Mhz !) which had Borland C on it. It was exciting. Not because I knew anything about unix but the small book told me about functions to do stuff that I did not know how to do in Pascal (don’t remember what it was though : thinking hard it might have been printf !! or probably reading a directory). I got my hands on gcc only at the start of my college. That was for the lack of a 32bit compiler on windows or DOS. It was the times of ‘dos-extenders’, VESA video modes and DJGPP !! DJGPP gave me company for a long time (even after I started with Linux (RHL 4.2 or 5 IIRC)). For some time it was also MSVC, learning DirectX. Finally towards the end of my course I was entirely into OpenGL and Linux.
