Origins of "Hello, World!"?

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
You know, the standart "My First Program" for everyone.



I always link it to Apple but my CS in high school made us make the same in Delphi (and even turtle talk, but thats another story).



So is it an Apple independent thing and if yes how far back does it date?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10
    scottscott Posts: 7,431member
    Of course many of us learned it in K&R's C book.
  • Reply 2 of 10
    ibrowseibrowse Posts: 1,749member
    I had this ancient C book and another book on C++ from my school's library and it was in there. It's also in every other tutorial/lesson I have ever seen.
  • Reply 3 of 10
    gspottergspotter Posts: 342member
    I contributed once a helloworld variant to this page



    According to this page:

    "While minimal test programs such as this existed since the development of programmable computers, the tradition of using "Hello, world!" as the test message was probably started by its use as an example program in the book The C Programming Language, by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. "
  • Reply 4 of 10
    Scott's right the first Hello World program was introduced by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie in their book about C.



    Apparently, Kernighan also featured a program that outputted Hello World in a tutorial for the B language, C's predecessor (and no, that's not a joke) although it wasn't a Hello World program in the usual sense i.e. the simplest possible program to generate visible output.
  • Reply 5 of 10
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    Dennis Ritchie... isn't that the guy who shags Madonna?

























    [I'm not that stupid]
  • Reply 6 of 10
    overhopeoverhope Posts: 1,123member
    Back in the day, our coding training school was computer stores in which we hungry proto-geeks would demonstrate our l33t BASIC skills thus:



    10 PRINT "I AM SKILL";

    20 GOTO 10



    A friend of mine has a t-shirt with exactly that program on it, and the output. Still brings a tear to my eye...



    That said, don't some of the early Macintosh promotional materials show "Hello World!" in a drawing package?
  • Reply 7 of 10
    curiousuburbcuriousuburb Posts: 3,325member
    i remember "hello world" test program scripts for PASCAL and BASIC on the Apple ][ and first year CS on VAX terminals back in the 80s...



    < feels old suddenly >
  • Reply 8 of 10
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by curiousuburb

    i remember "hello world" test program scripts for PASCAL and BASIC on the Apple ][ and first year CS on VAX terminals back in the 80s...



    < feels old suddenly >




    early 80's i wasn't born yet...YOUR OLD!





    haha i'm jk...depending on how old u are
  • Reply 9 of 10
    drewpropsdrewprops Posts: 2,321member
    I was programming in the early 80's and never encountered "Hello World". My language of choice was BASIC and later I moved on toward FORTRAN & PASCAL. Somewhere in my stuff I still have some of my original code printed out. Wouldn't mean a thing to me now.



    And Ast3r3x, you've got it backwards....you're just a baby!
  • Reply 10 of 10
    airslufairsluf Posts: 1,861member
Sign In or Register to comment.