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124 points by blenderob

by daft_pink

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I too started using computers at a young age and loved them and even got my own Nintendo when I was young. I feel very conflicted about the current anti screen fad. My son is very young and my wife doesn’t want him to use screens at all.
I don’t want him to use tik tok or facebook but maybe I will buy an apple 2 or setup a rpi emulator and play little old school games that weren’t available online.

by yason

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I got my C64 in 1985. Obviously, I can revisit the graphics and sounds of that machine online now, via emulators and youtube videos. But one thing I always remember is the smell of warming circuit boards that oozed from the casing soon after you turned on the computer.
Anecdotally, the cassette player that came with the machine had a misconfigured tape head. Because there was no internet nobody knew why it didn't load most of the games I got with the machine. However, saving and loading programs did work. So, I started writing programs from the user manual and game listings from some programming books I found in the library, and saving them on my cassettes. Because the user manual covered not only some tutorial BASIC but also the machine's graphics, sprites, sounds, and what other features I eventually, after getting some hang of writing BASIC, did also realize that what I could create with the machine hardware itself was virtually unlimited. I didn't necessarily know what the commands did with the underlying hardware but I knew if I poked certain numbers into certain addresses I could make my sprites appear on the screen and make them move around.
By the time I got the cassette player fixed by some computer repair shop, learned about tuning the tape head, and I could finally load all the games bundled with the machine, I was seriously hooked with programming and the highly desired games no longer seemed that interesting in comparison. I knew someone sat down and wrote all those games and instead of playing them I could learn to do the same myself.
Been programming ever since.

by TrackerFF

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At school we had a bunch of older machines with windows 3.1, which had some touch typing program installed - it was the only thing we were allowed to use
Our first family computer was bought back in 1995. IIRC it was a 166 MHz Pentium / 16 MB ram machine with Windows 95. It cost around $3500-4000 back then, and that's not adjusted for inflation.
EDIT: As a side note, 3 years later I managed to get my hands on a copy of Half-Life, right after it was launched. Our computer, with standalone graphics card, was barely able to run the game. Back in those days, being a gamer and chasing cutting edge graphics was really expensive.
Prior to this we had a electric typewriter, and the main purpose of the machine was to be used for writing documents and other business activities. My first experience with programming, was editing HTML files. I then went to the library to look for books on programming, and the only book I could find there (rural nowhere with population 3000) was a book on Pascal, or possibly Delphi.
I was told that there was this one wiz kid in our small rural town that as supposed to be "really good with computers", he was a couple of years old. I hit him up, and the first thing I noticed in his room was this big "Borland C++" box on his shelf - he showed me a basic 3D flight simulator clone he was working on, as well as some sort of Doom clone. I was in awe.
Suffice to say, he did very well during the dot com boom. Skipped college, and went straight into employment.
A couple of years later, when I started in high-school, some older semi-retired developer had recently moved to town. He worked with our school, and offered a Java programming class. Really excellent teacher, and that was the moment I decided I wanted to work with computers.

by pixel_popping

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I'll always remember that moment on RPG maker (probably around 9 years old) where suddenly I've understood Variables (I was experienced with HTML and so-on prior), a whole world was unlocked, VB6 programs became possible, everything "clicked" suddenly. I feel once you understand the fundamentals on how it works, it's easy to progress very fast as a child/teenager afterward.
With my kid I want to ensure that fundamentals of computing are understood as early as possible, this is what allows you to understand how the world is interconnected.

by qsera

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One thing that was nice about the graphics programming those days was that when you drew something on the screen, it remained there until your program erased it.
This means that you could create cool looking graphics easily. For example, you can just compute the points of a circle and draw the points one by one, and in the screen it will show a full circle being drawn.
"Modern" graphics libs (even SDL I think), made this impossible by having redraw the whole screen every frame so that now my program has to remember all the points there the program drew before to get the same effect.
The former workflow made graphics programming so much fun for me and I find the modern "fast rendering pipeline" boring and not a lot of fun.
Things like that, one by one, have sucked the whole fun out of computing.

by s1mon

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I'm old enough and lucky enough to have had my first computing experiences (1978-80) be on a teletype in our elementary school which was connected to a minicomputer that the town owned. The connection was an acoustically coupled modem/analog phone line that ran at 300 baud. The exciting thing was to write very basic BASIC programs and see results on the printout. There was no CRT, everything was via the literal teletype - a keyboard and a clunky printer.

by mfld

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Does anyone remember the art of optimising MSDOS startup to have enough free memory for games? And inspecting gorillas.bas? For me, this probably contributed to an interest to learn more and experiment. In fact, I'd like to encourage my son to a similar creative exploration, but don't how this is going to happen when pulled into the current generation of games and videos.

by Enivel

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For me it was the view source era. Around 2001 I was copying HTML from Geocities pages and modifying them in Notepad. I didn't know what a programming language was but I knew how to change the background color and add a marquee. That instant feedback loop -- save, alt-tab, refresh -- was enough to get me hooked.

by erikbye

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My childhood was PCBoard, POV-Ray, then later Lightwave, 3ds Max, Bryce. WADs, Hammer Editor, GTkRadiant, both of the scenes. Sierra and Lucasarts games... Turbo Pascal!

by darepublic

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In 92 as I recall my school's unremarkable computer lab had apple iis and Macintosh mix. We never learned any programming we wrote essays in word software and got to play kidpix, Carmen San Diego, Oregon trail if we were good

by lelanthran

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These books should be rewritten for a modern platform: https://usborne.com/za/books/computer-and-coding-books
I spent much time carefully typing these things in (spy games, horror games, etc), then even more time designing my own adventure games after reading the adventure titles.

by WillAdams

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I actually had to revisit this sort of thing in a recent design for a CNC --- for want of a good way to determine the location of a smaller circle nested into the region between two larger circles, I made a Circular Array of circles of the desired size, adjusting the number of them until one lined up as desired:
https://community.carbide3d.com/uploads/default/original/3X/...
(If someone knows a good/ideal technique for that, I'd be glad to learn of it --- my math background is kind of shaky)

by cube00

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I never understood why Microsoft didn't have affordable licences to encourage kids to program.
The school computer lab had Visual Basic but you only got an hour week in there as part of the computing subject, the school library computers couldn't have it because the licence was per seat not per site.
You really only had QBASIC which was great but we really wanted to write Windows apps. You'd be up for a thousand dollars for a MSDN academic subscription just to get Visual Basic.
I guess the blessing was instead of Windows apps we made web pages and JavaScript games hosted on our parents ISP webhost accounts while we dreamed of the day we'd have enough money to buy our own .com domain.

by raghavchamadiya

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That smell thing is so real. I still get hit with it randomly and I'm immediately 10 years old again

by Guestmodinfo

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You seem to be writing about me :) I also lived a very similar childhood. Class 10 computer science Board paper I prepared using pen and paper computing only. The only difference is that I had BASIC, instead of LOGO. Another difference is that I was not in an industrial town. Since sometimes you write in your posts about growing up in a small industrial town. I have a hunch you grew up in Jamshedpur in Jharkhand state.

by joak

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Actually in 1982 I was able to store my programs on standard audio cassettes. Hardware needed: a modem and a cheap tape recorder. My apple II modem would chirp the ascii binary like Starwars' R2D2, I'd record that and when needed I'd play it back to the modem.

by GuB-42

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> These are expensive machines
Impressive how that part changed. Today, many computers are cheaper than the desk they are sitting on. Many companies pay over $2000 for office furniture, and that's not even fancy. A $1000 laptop sits on top of it.
Furniture made by an actual cabinet maker will easily get to $5000+. About the price of a maxed out gaming rig, or an enterprise level workstation.

by matchbok3

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Some of my fondest memories as a young kid was hacking away at an 800mhz machine my dad bought me. Certainly a lot of time was wasted, but my knowledge of the system was also helped a bit.
Seeing kids nowadays interfacing with just a touch screen makes me fearful that a foundation of knowledge is not being built, even among the more nerdy types.

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by jeremyjh

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I had many similar experiences, but almost a decade earlier. At grade school we had Apple 2s with Logo, Oregon Trail and other education classics. My junior high was a small parochial school that still had TRS-80s in 1988, along with some apples. My freshman year of high school was in a well funded district in Chicago suburbs. They had Macs with Excel and Word - we wrote lab reports in science classes with our data input and graphed in excel and the graphs pasted into the word doc reports - in 1990.

by didgetmaster

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I remember playing Digger on my IBM PC clone sold by AT&T (6300) back in 1987 or 1988.
I also remember that the game speed was set to some factor of the computer's clock speed. When I later tried to run the same game after I upgraded my hardware, the game went so fast, you could not even play it.

by king_geedorah

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It's striking how concise the program in the first video is. Also I had no idea "Digger" existed. I've only ever known Dig Dug in that style.

by PepperdineG

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My first computer was an Access Matrix that I'd play on at my dad's office. It was such a neat computer back in the day as a proto-laptop with built-in modem and printer.

by regexorcist

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I became the school computer genius by teaching everyone to cheat in exams with Winpopup. My earliest memories though are also in DOS with an Olivetti computer.

by bsoles

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I had fun times around 1985 with zx81, ZX spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amiga 500. Creating "games" with sprites and all... Even writing for loops with print statements were fun.

by anthk

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Also, on Logo, it's like the jump from C64 basic or CP/M Basic to VB6 but on steroids. UCB logo and manuals can be up to an SICP-lite level.
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html
Ah, yes, moving a turtle and yaddah yaddah. Yes, you have it, and material on par (I am no kidding) to "Intro to symbolic computation" from the Common Lisp world. The 3rd volume can be hardcore compared to what I learnt in Elementary with Logo.

by kj4211cash

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Love this! You've inspired me to write my own blog post about my early days with an Amiga (1000?). I wonder how many of us have similar experiences.

by nlawalker

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A general thought on children and computers, not directly related, but that I've always wanted to communicate here:
One of my strongest-held opinions is that children need to be taught, explicitly and by example, that there is nothing you see on the screen that simply "comes with" the computer, and that of all the fascinating/distracting/useful things on the web, none of it just "appeared." It is all the result of people making creative decisions and doing creative, technical, intellectual work to bring ideas to life.
Lots of stimulating books and messaging for children focus on how things in society and in the physical world come to be. Holes are dug, resources are gathered and processed, smart people create complex things including machines that create even more complex things. People perform hard labor to achieve amazing things. People gather, form consensus, and create social structures and government. People have ideas and create art. People observe problems and create solutions.
Children internalize this messaging and develop an appreciation and understanding of how effort, creativity and intelligence result in amazing things that make everyone's lives better, but (in my opinion) that messaging was never sufficiently updated to ensure that that appreciation and understanding extends to software, which increasingly runs our world. We don't put enough effort into showing children that their favorite games, all the stuff in all the menus on our phones, all the software they use to learn or communicate or play, all of it is made by people who had ideas, made design decisions, and then made them real through accumulated wisdom and great intellectual effort.
Not every kid needs to "learn to code", but they should all learn that everything they look at and tap on their screens was made by people who did, and who wanted to make things to solve problems and make life better.
It's unfortunate that the rise of AI slop has complicated this message; that's all I'll say about that.

by pelasaco

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Childhood computing for me smells like LOGO programming, King Quest, Space Quest and Police Quest games.. I loved test drive from Sierra. I graduated as game developer, because of Sierra. I wanted to work at nintendo. I ended up writing my firsts exploits in 99, got some fame on bugtrag and became cyber security expert in the 2000s.. but the only thing that I wanted, was to do game dev for living.. maybe one day...

by sonnyproto

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Good old time :)

by echelon

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I remember the titles on the old Apple II machines at elementary school:
- Oregon Trail
- Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego
- Super Solvers (the best of the lot)
I also got a Windows 95 IBM Aptiva PC from my parents that had a lot of educational software. I can only remember some of it:
- The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain (I loved this game - it had logic programming, 3D spatial reasoning tasks, biology, ...)
- Encarta Encyclopedia virtual maze
- Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (I hated it; I learned to type when I got onto IGN Boards, EZboards, AIM, and IRC.)
- King's Quest VII (this counts as educational logic puzzles, right?)
- MechWarrior II (well, I considered it educational...)
I'm envious of kids today growing up with LLMs and vibe coding. I would have had a blast at that age with the tools we have today.

by k2xl

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I miss those days. Oregon trail was the first game I played on the computer in 1993 (there was a computer in our Kindergarten class).
Nostalgia for the old web - building websites in HTML on Angelfire and Expage.com. Learning programming on visual basic and how to copy and paste <marquee> to welcome people to the site and to sign the guestbook…

by empressplay

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I was lucky enough to be an autistic kid in the 1980s with access to a steady stream of new and novel computers: Apple II, Sinclair, Commodore, Atari, TI, Macintosh... kept me engaged and off the 'short bus'. If I had been born ten years earlier I'm certain my life would have been dramatically different (in a very bad way).

by anthk

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Similar experience, but I sucked at Logo, as I was my first day with computer. I aced the 'encrypted' (number->letter substitution) math puzzle (similar to the Emacs one, M-x mpuzzle), tho.

by qsera

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As computers grew more powerful, they became less interesting.
There is a lesson in there somewhere that humanity has not yet woken up to.