Topic: First useful program

[T.Willey]

This thread (about 3d faces) got me thinking about my first useful program.  It was around 1998 and AutoCAD 14.  For some reason our consultant's drawings would always have a ton of 3d faces, and they would not work the way we needed them to.  I wrote a program that would search model space and redaw only the visible sections of the 3d faces.  My co-worker knew a little about programming (he exposed me to programming), so when it was slow we would work on programs.  No wonderful site like this existed (for me, atleast) then, but I had the printed copy of Customizing AutoCAD 14.

The command was called Face (lost the code a long time ago), and I even created a bmp for the toolbar button.  Good times.

Anyone else want to share?

[MP]

First useful programs (aside from winning lottery number generators cough) I wrote were for surveying: curve calcs, slope staking etc. and asphalt plant calibration. Around 1981. TBasic, years later via HP41CX code. First useful LISP proggy (marshalled via QuickBASIC proggy) was a floppy disk cataloging system, around 1988. IIRC.

[MP]

PS: Cool thread idea Tim. Pretty ambitious first proggy for a LISP neophyte to boot.

[David Bethel]

I haven't kept up with this for years.

http://www.davidbethel.com/lisp/

Look like the earliest is 3DSPIRAL  form 1994.  The newest 1 included here is 2002

ENFO and INFO are the ones I use the most to this day.

I know there were a couple older that I wrote but don't remember.

I use query.com 1991 that was posted in Cadence magazine.  You had to feed the binary code to ..... ( I can't remember the DOS program that compiled it into a .com executionable ..... )

-David

[MP]

Debug.exe could create com executables as long as the code segment didn't exceed something like 60kb.

60kb.

lol

[David Bethel]

YES !  Debug is the winner!   The binary Code was a pain   No errors allowed !

[Krushert]

My first code in a work environment (was exposed to Autocad and simple Lisp in night school) was tearing apart a code for steel framing LISP that drew W-Shapes in section and rebuilt it so it drew the steel framing correctly.  Also, it was a library based for selecting shape sizes and the library had outdated information so I deleted the library and chose user input for the dimensional data.  Then I added the ability to draw Angles and C-Channel shapes.    Done on R-13.  A lot of fun and rewarding as much as getting that first kiss.

When it comes to coding I am junkyard hack, I would find pieces mostly and parts of code done on the net that was done by geniuses like you folks and cobble them together into a Frankensteinish code that was very ugly in effeciency but suited my purpose.  It was only when I came here that I learn how to write code a little more prettier and efficeient.   My code is still cobbled together parts though.   

Excellent Post Tim.

[BIGAL]

1977 my neighbour built a paper punch tape reader for our company it was for traffic counts and I wrote the analysis software we way ahead at the time. It was run on a NEC 8" floppy drive pc.

[cmwade77]

We had a situation where our client insisted everything had to be dimensionend in Imperial Units, but this was for the military and at the time they insisted everything had to be dimensionend in Metric Units, so we had to submit two sets of PDFs, one with each, so my first useful code (code has been lost as well) would draw two copies of all dimensions on separate layers, one would be Imperial Units and one would be Metric Units, then we could freeze off whichever we didn't need. Now I would probably have further automated it to make a PDF of each.