Childhood Computing

https://susam.net/childhood-computing.html

by blenderob • 2 months ago

254 126 2 months ago

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

macNchz• 2 months ago

Yeah that jumped out to me, when I read that line I could instantly remember the smell of my school’s computer lab, like a time warp in my brain. More than 20 years later I can picture the lab from high school perfectly, I could draw a little map right now of which computers were where.

bitwize4• 2 months ago

I still remember getting that Pentium as a graduation present, and my room was suffused with the "new computer smell" for a day or two afterward. Ah, glorious.

king_geedorah• 2 months ago

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.

kj4211cash• 2 months ago

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.

jeremyjh• 2 months ago

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.

pixel_popping2• 2 months ago

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.

embedding-shape• 2 months ago

I similarly remember struggling with understanding what "classes" were in PHP as a kid and why on earth they'd ever be useful for, seems like needless abstractions, but finally it clicked, and a whole world opened up, suddenly I could understand much more of Zend Engine than before, and software engineering became a thing I started caring about. Of course, later I was enlightened again so now I avoid classes.

pixel_popping2• 2 months ago

I also remember the infamous "OOP" PHP war :)

anthk6• 2 months ago

Classes where undertood under Inform6 (a literal OOP language compiling against ZMachine, for text adventures -even more, as Tetris, Madbomber...) with two lines.

theragra2• 2 months ago

I remember how I started to make a simple text based game, and conditionals (in Pascal) were not enough. Ive asked my father, and he explained that the thing I want is possible with loops. At this moment, I was given all the tools that allow writing any kind of program.

sonnyproto• 2 months ago

Good old time :)

cube00• 2 months ago

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.

KellyCriterion• 2 months ago

...because Sales is busy with bombing schools with CoPilot & MS365 subscriptions and Sales Guys does not have this in their crosshair: They could create a much bigger and earlier addiction to MS products if they would enforce coding-for-kids-activities in schools and colleges :)

Joel_Mckay2• 2 months ago

Copilot and MS365 have some API areas that no one outside MS actually knows what they do.

Day 2 task was cleaning our Win11 Steam game install drive:

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI (when it works)

Day 1 task installing Win11 Pro in offline-mode without TPM/Bitlocker speeds up the benchmarks a bit for a game system:

https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/releases

Fun times, but most of the Win experience has always been removing garbage code/adware/shovel-ware. =3

WillAdams5• 2 months ago

They were too busy taking BASIC away from others:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

PaulDavisThe1st3• 2 months ago

I started my computing life on BBC Model B machines, which simply came with BASIC builtin, no license required. It was immediately apparent to me that there was something odd happening with operating systems that required you to pay extra to be able to write software.

40 years later, and I've successfully managed to never use a Microsoft product.

Joel_Mckay2• 2 months ago

People forget how locked down the systems were until Borland and finally GNU gcc entered the market (Unless you went Masm or Pascal.) I remember the MS visual C++ and VB manuals with compilers were over $8k/seat at one point (would be almost twice that in today dollars).

People sometimes underestimate how important search engines are to build applications without official documentation.

Supporting FOSS is more than a convenience for some, as most remember locked ecosystems were not fun at any age. I remember GW-Basic and VB3.0 made building programs easy for kids, but it had other issues besides the license cost. Prior to Visual studio, making standalone binaries was simply too difficult for most until the Internet.

Now the average AAA game is around 40GiB on Steam, and g++/clang is the standard tool-suites. Fun times, =3

anthk6• 2 months ago

Most people either pirated Visual C/C++ or got GNU/Linux with tons of devel packages and amateur books (Learn C as if you were a freshman in College) or something like that.

asdff2• 2 months ago

In my day adults were clueless on tech. Not like there was anyone to teach programming when they could barely turn on their computer. Hopefully it's better now in that.

Enivel• 2 months ago

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.

k2xl• 2 months ago

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…

WillAdams5• 2 months ago

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)

sebastiennight3• 2 months ago

Let's give it a try.

I'm going to make two assumptions based on your screenshot:

1. The large circles A and B are touching each other

2. You know the radius (a,b,c) of each circle and want the third one (circle C) to touch both of the first two.

What I'd do is place the center of both circles A and B on the same horizontal line and choose a frame of reference such that the center of circle A is the origin, and the center of circle B is placed at coordinates (a+b, 0)

Now we are looking for the coordinates (x, y) of the center of circle C, placed above the x-axis. Which by the way is one of two solutions, as there is a symmetrical circle C' placed below the x-axis, with the coordinates (x, -y)

We know that if we traced a straight line from the center of C, it would intersect the x-axis at a 90° angle. So drawing that line creates two triangles which each have a right angle in this spot:

- one triangle on the left, where the hypothenuse goes from the center of A (0,0) to the center of C (x,y). Its length is the sum of the radii of A and C.

- one triangle on the right, where the hypothenuse goes from the center of B (a+b,0) to the center of C (x,y). Its length is the sum of the radii of B and C.

Both of these triangles share a vertical segment of length (y).

The left triangle's bottom segment has a length of (x) and the right triangle's bottom segment has a length of: (a+b) - x

We know from Pythagore that the square of the length of the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides of each triangle, so we know that:

    (a+c)^2 = x^2 + y^2

    (b+c)^2 = ((a+b) - x)^2 + y^2

    y^2 = (a+c)^2 - x^2 = (b+c)^2 - ((a+b) - x)^2

    (a+c)^2 - x^2 = (b+c)^2 - ((a+b) - x)^2

Develop it all

    a^2 + c^2 + 2ac - x^2 = b^2 + c^2 + 2bc - ((a+b)^2 + x^2 - 2ax - 2bx)

Simplify

    a^2 + 2ac = b^2 + 2bc - (a^2 + b^2 + 2ab - 2ax - 2bx)


    a^2 + 2ac = 2bc - a^2 - 2ab + 2ax + 2bx

    2 a^2 + 2ac - 2bc + 2ab = 2ax + 2bx

        a^2 + ac + ab - bc
    x = ------------------
               a+b

and from there you find y, from y^2 = (a+c)^2 - x^2.

I did notice that in your screenshot A and B are of the same size, so if you knew this from the start it becomes way simpler.

x = a (of course the center of your new circle is at the vertical of the point where both circles touch, which is obvious due to the symmetry of the problem)

and

y = squareroot(c^2 + 2ac)

WillAdams5• 2 months ago

Thank you for that!

I am going to make a link to your comment from the forum post in question:

https://community.carbide3d.com/t/knapp-joint-with-cnc/19723 (scroll all the way to the bottom)

and will hopefully be able to translate that into Open(Python)SCAD code so as to make a generalized solution for my current project:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

TrackerFF• 2 months ago

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.

safety1st2• 2 months ago

I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck.

The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a lot of free time could mess around with.

The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab and an unusually open minded computer teacher. If you demonstrated that you were dependable, he'd basically let you do whatever you want. While my school was mostly a Mac shop, I was a bit of a Microsoft shill in high school so by graduation I'd figured out how to stand up and run a Windows NT file & web server for our school newspaper. Another guy was a Linux nut and had been allowed to do something similar with RedHat for the school's drafting lab.

Inclination met opportunity, one thing led to another, and I went on to work with technology for the next 25 years of my life.

What worries me now is that so much technology is so locked down. It must be a very rare school today that allows the kind of freedom we had. There is no IDE preinstalled on a phone, and even merely installing an "unapproved" app is under fire.

If for no other reason, for the sake of the kids the industry, the tools, the operating systems need to be more open. They need to be tinkerable. That's how the most motivated kids tend to learn. Our best and brightest are not being made because we've closed things down to maximize some hedge fund's ROI somewhere. The financialization of America was a grave error.

stavros• 2 months ago

But making tools tinkerable is incompatible with extracting maximal value from them!

RiverCrochet2• 2 months ago

A silver lining is that Javascript code will run on any modern browser+OS and can be created with nothing but a text editor. Even though this is many degrees of abstraction from facing the bare metal that was there in the 80s and 90s, it's better than nothing.

alterom4• 2 months ago

I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck.
The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s
The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab

So, you essentially own your career to your parents being well-off and tech inclined.

It's not like you ended up in that high school by accident.

Sure, being born in such a family is a stroke of luck that many people don't get to have.

I did; my mom was a software engineer in the USSR, and I grew up in the 1990s Ukraine with a PC at home, and went to a great high school in Odesa, and later, in Brooklyn when we immigrated.

Like @susam, I played Digger on IBM PC 286 as my first game when I was 4.

I have a PhD in math and Google/Meta/MS on my resume today.

I owe this to many strokes of luck, but how tinkerable the PCs were was not the most significant one by far.

The most important part was access to production tech, seeing it used, and having a role model that made it a natural consideration as a career choice.

And the "luck" of what was available in my K12 was 100% the work of my parents who got me into those schools.

Credit where credit is due, dude.

c22• 2 months ago

...an unusually open minded computer teacher.

I've heard this story several times before and I, myself, had an unusually open minded computer teacher as a youth. I'm beginning to suspect this attribute is is not so unusual amongst computer teachers as has been assumed.

sunshinesnacks2• 2 months ago

What worries me now is that so much technology is so locked down

Raspberry Pi is a nice exception. I know there are other good examples, but it was the first thing I thought of…

steve1977• 2 months ago

I once discovered where the texts for our touch typing exams were saved on the network.

Made for some funny exams afterwards...

Edit: well, funny for my adolescent self...

gesis• 2 months ago

We did the opposite.

Once the source texts were found, we changed them all to short sequences of home row keys.

Everyone began typing at 300+ wpm.

bsoles• 2 months ago

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.

anthk6• 2 months ago

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.

pelasaco2• 2 months ago

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...

qsera6• 2 months ago

As computers grew more powerful, they became less interesting.

There is a lesson in there somewhere that humanity has not yet woken up to.

bluefirebrand2• 2 months ago

I don't know if it's that quite it

I think they became less interesting because they became more homogenous, more standardized, more commercialized

It's like the internet. It was more interesting when everything was spread out and you felt like you had to explore it. Now it's all the same content collected on the same 5 sites, and it feels like there's nothing actually interesting out there anymore

qsera6• 2 months ago

Not sure. Computers where pretty homogenous back then as well. Every time I find myself infront of a computer, I would do "cd games", and there would be games...

I think it started becoming less interesting as it grew more powerful and with it came more capable displays and GUI interface, and before you know it, computers are indistinguishable from a damn television.

At least for me as computers started showing more realistic graphics, it became less abstract, less magical, less interesting. After all, reality is pretty boring...Not sure how we collectively missed that fact...

echelon2• 2 months ago

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.

vunderba• 2 months ago

Awesome, you're one of the few people who played nearly the same set of games I did. My favorite was probably The Island of Dr. Brain, though all of the Dr. Brain games were great as a kid.

One particularly hilarious part was right at the beginning of Island of Dr. Brain, back in the old-school days of manual-based copyright protection. The game would give you longitude and latitude coordinates, and you had to look them up in the manual to figure out where you were supposed to parachute. If you got it wrong, your character would just splash into the ocean.

I actually referenced The Island of Dr. Brain in something I made about a year ago. I don’t know if you played it, but it has a jigsaw puzzle as one of the mini-games. It was one of the most unusual jigsaw puzzles I’d ever seen: an animated jigsaw, where the entire image was a effectively looping "cinemagraph". One of the first things LLM-assisted projects I put together was a jigsaw puzzle game with about a dozen custom animated jigsaw puzzles. Link is in my profile.

This is a bit of a deep cut, but my most distinct memory of Super Solvers: Midnight Rescue in DOS was that it used the PC speaker to play “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” If you did anything that triggered a sound effect like jumping the music would immediately reset and start over. It was like a weird, primitive version of scratching a vinyl record as if you were some kind of amateur PC-speaker DJ. (and kind of the opposite of Dig-Dug)

echelon2• 2 months ago

I love HN for this.

I'll go digging for your game!

nullIsAnObject• 2 months ago

2 words: Family Computing. When that magazine showed up and there was something I could use on my Apple IIe, I would sit there (or kneel, actually, we had one of those 80s kneeling chair things) endlessly, even skipping meals or forgetting to go take a leak every once in a while. I discovered flow state in 5th grade and didn't even realize it.

I used to skip recess in elementary school to go write code in the computer lab; the teachers all knew me and would laugh out loud when I made the computer make a noise... until one day when I programmed the monophonic speaker to sound like it was polyphonic and out came the title theme from Terms of Endearment in all of it's 80s glory. I miss those days.

Man, mavis beacon teaches typing! I wonder if that ever actually did me any good.

Guestmodinfo• 2 months ago

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.

empressplay• 2 months ago

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).

didgetmaster• 2 months ago

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.

haritha-j• 2 months ago

That's where your PC's turbo button comes in!

qsera6• 2 months ago

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.

Jtsummers• 2 months ago

It's been a while (over a decade now), but I think SDL allows you to leave the contents on the screen if you don't call the clear function before you render new content. I don't know how well that'd work with resizing a window though.

qsera6• 2 months ago

I think it works like that if acceleration is no enabled. But even then I think it does not work reliably..I might be missing something though.

PhilipRoman• 2 months ago

SDL is a relatively high level API and framebuffer style graphics work fine on it. I think there are some edge cases for X11 with non-compositing window manager where you will get interesting glitches if the window moves.

bitwize4• 2 months ago

Historically these weren't "edge cases"; all windowed environments sent a "redraw yourself" event to a window when it needed to be shown after having been covered up, that was handled specially by the application. In X11 this was an Expose event, in Windows this was called WM_PAINT. If you had a fancy X server back in the day, you could enable backing store; this kept a framebuffer of the window contents in memory even if the window itself was covered up that could be quickly restored upon exposure. This was incredibly useful and made redraws fast and glitch-free, but back in the days when RAM was expensive (you know, unlike today...) it could not be relied on in all X implementations. Compositing WMs have the equivalent of backing store for all windows, all the time.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 2 months ago

Both so-called "retained" and "immediate" mode graphics libraries continue to exist for most platforms, and you can choose to use whichever one you prefer.

qsera6• 2 months ago

I have looked it up in the past, and I have looked it up now, but I cannot find a reliable documentation that describes it.

For example, do you know what combination of flags listed here https://documentation.help/SDL/sdlsetvideomode.html would do the trick? Or anything that is not listed there would also help.

mike_hock• 2 months ago

I mean, you can obviously just draw to your own in-memory framebuffer that you never erase and then copy that to the physical backbuffer every frame. But there's no point in doing it that way when you can easily afford to re-render everything.

Having a limited budget of how much of the screen you can update in 17ms made for fun programming challenges, as did other limitations of the old hardware. Game developers came up with ingenious ways to leverage the hardware and make it seem like it could do more than it actually could.

Scanline-accurate switching of video attributes while wasting no clock cycles doing everything else and without a timer. That kind of stuff.

Programming to artificial self-imposed limits is not the same.

rhyperior2• 2 months ago

Your post just clicked something from of a deep memory into place.

In the early 80s when the IBM PC hit the scene, Hercules had a graphics card that was amazing and offered better than CGA graphics. I was plinking on it at my dad’s friend’s house, drawing circles and stuff, and on HIS computer the graphics were retained. I had to figure out how to clear the screen, whereas on mine, not having the Hercules card, it wasn’t retained. Never understood what was happening until now.

GuB-42• 2 months ago

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.

rhyperior2• 2 months ago

I don’t know… if the top of line PC cost $3000 30 years ago, it seems like we’re pretty close to that today for class-equivalent hardware (without going absurd - 32GB of DDR5, game playing video card, 4TB SSD…)

xboxnolifes• 2 months ago

Inflation adjusted, those particular specs would be much cheaper. At least prior to recent price changes due to AI demand.

You can definitely go much higher if you really go for TOP of the line though.

asdff2• 2 months ago

Seems like computers have become a sort of ongoing expense though. They are cheaper at the get, but no one is getting a new desk every 3 years like they might a new laptop. People are probably burning through laptops for one reason or another way more than they burn through desks. Company might not ever replace that desk.

The computers companies ditch and you can get on ebay are no slouches either. Recent gen i5 i7 mini pcs some with 16gb ram already. These are no slouch cpus. No m series macs but all these companies are doing are replacing it with a newer i5 or i7 mini pc, and the worker is often what, opening excel and outlook and teams, same as always.

matchbok3• 2 months ago

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.

regexorcist• 2 months ago

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.

lelanthran• 2 months ago

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.

PepperdineG• 2 months ago

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.

nlawalker• 2 months ago

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.

byzantinegene• 2 months ago

very good point, but I think the message has been complicated long before AI slop, from the rise of tablets and social media platforms.

s1mon• 2 months ago

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.

joak2• 2 months ago

You could use this audio at 300 baud by recording it on a standard audio cassette. Then play the audio back as input to the modem to retrieve the data

anthk6• 2 months ago

Minimodem does this.

erikbye• 2 months ago

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!

joak2• 2 months ago

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.

RiverCrochet2• 2 months ago

You really used a modem instead of the tape out jack?

mikestaas• 2 months ago

The tape jack is a modem.

yason• 2 months ago

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.

stevenwoo2• 2 months ago

I remember only having enough money to buy the C64 initially and being so relieved to have the checksum on the typed in programs match up, it was ephemeral but it was either that or cartridge programs. The tape drive was the next purchase for me and finally the hard drive. It was still a bargain for the features IMHO compared to the Apple II and other competing devices like Sinclair and Ti99.

ido• 2 months ago

A hard drive for the c64? Are you sure you didn’t mean the floppy disk drive?

jadbox2• 2 months ago

I LOVE how the C64 OS was a programming language (BASIC). Even if you used the hardware the gaming, you had to learn a little bit of programming (LOAD "*",8,1).

mfld• 2 months ago

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.

nosioptar• 2 months ago

It's been a long time, but I remember it a bit.

I also remember running over to the neighbor's to make a copy of a working config file after effing up my config file. (Himem.sys?)

endgame• 2 months ago

Yeah, I spent more time than I cared to admit fiddling with DEVICE(HIGH) lines, tweaking FILES= and BUFFERS=, running MEMMAKER.EXE over and over as if that would do something, but it was never the real thing. The real thing is making the machine do something I wanted instead of what the manufacturer wanted. For a kid of this generation, I'd look for games with reasonable modding APIs, perhaps something like Lua, and ideally something where playing multiplayer lets him show his creations off to his friends.

From there, look to packages like LÖVE which still use Lua but give full control over the whole game, and help him explore and wrangle the things he needs to understand to make his programming real. And if the lower levels interest him, help him dig deeper. But I think modding and scripting is probably the best place to start.

contingencies• 2 months ago

Indeed: config.sys autoexec.bat, EMS, HIGHMEM, and all those terrible early sound blaster drivers, mouse drivers, network drivers... I think the one I found hardest to get running was Quarantine. But it was definitely one of the best games. So imaginative for the era. And Australian! With music from some later famous bands! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwO8XWbB1Pk&list=PLA5hK1g6CN... https://www.playdosgames.com/play/quarantine

darepublic• 2 months ago

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

anthk6• 2 months ago

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.

daft_pink• 2 months ago

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.

zakisaad• 2 months ago

We're currently at this stage with out kids, too.

I think the staunch "no screen" mentality is a broad-stroke lever that non-technical thought leaders in the child wellness space have stuck to, and I understand where they come from.

Though, as someone who owes his livelihood to being able to tinker and experiment with technology as a child, I'm looking toward a more measured approach. I may very well set up an airgapped Linux box (Windows has come a long way since the XP days, and gone entirely the wrong way) and let my kids proverbially "have at it" - this way, they can't get stuck in big tech's psycho-loops or sucked into YouTube's colourful dopamine machine - which I think, is the entire drive behind "no screens".

I think well-measured exposure is imperative.

PebblesRox• 2 months ago

We set up a “kid laptop” for our kids (ages 3, 6 and 9) that has a short list of allowed websites and a curated set of installed programs.

We treat it like any other toy: they can pretty much play with it whenever they want for as long as they want. Of course they have to share it between the three of them, so there’s a natural limit there.

Every so often we’ll add something new; most recently I installed SimAnt after we were watching ants in our backyard.

So far we’ve been very happy with this approach!

pelasaco2• 2 months ago

i went the same road, and have great results. No mobile. Every night, read books with the kids. Video Game in the weekend, only 2D games, like Mario 3. Worked great for us. Now they are teenagers, doing well in sports and school, have always a book with them, and no social media.

LeoPanthera• 2 months ago

For someone whose first computer was an Acorn BBC Micro in 1984, I have never felt older than I do today.

bitwize4• 2 months ago

I was 4 when computing entered my life. My father was exploring some engine design ideas and used a succession of devices, each more powerful than the last but all proving futile. First it was a scientific calculator, then a programmable scientific calculator. Then he got one of those devices originally made by Sharp but badge-engineered by Radio Shack which they called a "pocket computer"; very calculator-like, but had an alphanumeric keyboard and could store and run BASIC programs written on it with a one-line display.

Ultimately he bit the bullet and went back to Radio Shack to buy the most powerful computer they sold at the time: the TRS-80 Model 16. It was a variant of their TRS-80 Model II business-class computer but with a 68000 daughtercard with a quarter to half a meg of memory. He used this to finally write the engine simulations he'd been planning in his head all along, replete with graphical curve plots and an animation of the piston turning the crankshaft. It ran at about four seconds per frame, but it was still spectacular to behold. I was fascinated. I sat there and watched him type in the programs line by line. I so desperately wanted to poke at it myself, so to keep my grubby mitts off his very expensive machine, my dad went down to Crazy Eddie's and got me a Commodore VIC-20, cheap, for my fifth birthday.

My world had changed.

The VIC-20 came with an easy-to-read manual that introduced new users to the basics of programming with the machine's built-in BASIC, including POKE and PEEK commands that could be used to control its display and sound capabilities. One of the example programs displayed an animated "PETSCII bird" flying across the screen. Even though it was nowhere mentioned in the book, I knew what had to be done: I had to make that bird controllable with cursor keys.

And so I did it. It took me a couple days? few days? But I bent the machine to my will, and I've been chasing that high for 43 years now.

keernan• 2 months ago

I got my first computer when I was 26. It had taken 30 days to arrive and when I got word I could pick it up, I left work an hour early, rushed to the computer store, and was into my apartment by 4:30 or so. I unpacked and set things up on my dining room table. The next thing I knew it was 4:30am.

Things have been pretty much the same in the 48 years since.

ruszki• 2 months ago

One of my earliest memories is when I and my family draw and created black and white pictures via a word processor on our C64. There were characters which were different forms, like triangles, or small rectangles. Nowadays there are similar ones in Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_Shapes_(Unicode_bloc.... As a few years old kid, that was already magical for us at that time.

One of my nieces, could find an input field on my iPhone's lock screen, and she played for quite long, just by typing emojis. Since, then my "frequent emojis" list contains a lot of hearts, unicorns, horses, and other animals. But of course, the difference compared to the old times, that our C64 was probably the only computer in the whole small village in Eastern Europe at that time, while my nieces encounter electronic devices all the time, so they will probably not remember these as starkly as I do.

OhMeadhbh• 2 months ago

I upvoted this post because a) I love hearing people's memories of their first programming interactions and b) Susam's website is delightfully straight-forward: no ads, appeals to download AI apps and the videos are in support of the text. I love it!

lugu• 2 months ago

I installed Gnome on the home computer for the kids. I just realized how disempowering the Gnome really is. I remember, as a kid, navigating all menus to understand how it works. With Gnome, my kids barely can set the background to an image, can't even have a solid color background. I will probably move to DMS or KDE.

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 months ago

My start was a Heathkit programmable calculator, in the mid-1970s.

My first computer was a VIC-20, in 1982, or 1983. I got it while I was still in tech school.

I used HP computers, at my day job, in the 1980s, to write ASM, Pascal, and BASIC programs, for controlling GPIB-based test equipment. I was an EE, and the coding was an “adjunct.”

My first real personal computer, was a Mac Plus, in 1986 (I was 24). That was the one that started me really getting into coding.

killerstorm• 2 months ago

I start with BASIC on ZX Spectrum and C64, then QBASIC on MS-DOS, Turbo Pascal, etc.

I feel like it's more friendly and chill way to get into computing than what kids get these days -- too many options, leaky abstractions, etc.

And it's not hard to go from BASIC to assembly to understand how computer work on lower level - BASIC commands only do a little bit of computing at a time, so you get used to it. While Python and JS line of code can do a lot...

theragra2• 2 months ago

Part about smell hit me strong. As a child of uni professor, I had some access to university computer lab. The smell in professor room was very plastic, dusty, a touch of burnt rubber. This smell meant a world to me. Access to something absolutely magical: not only cool games, but the world of adults who knew how to operate these machines.

I remember how at 12 or 13 year old, my father had given me a printout of Turbo Pascal program that calculated square root equation, and told me to print and run it.

That was a beginning of my programming career.

mintflow• 2 months ago

I do not have the luck to get access to computer in my childhood. But the articles still make me feel nostalgia, especially the sound. With limited resource, people at that times just create some good stuffs.

Chronos742• 2 months ago

My entire life has revolved around tech as a result of a Tandy 1000 SX in the mid 1980's. I'm not exactly sure how old I was, but it was single digits when my dad brought it home. He worked for a small, local retail chain and maintained their early computer-based point-of-sale systems, along with a mainframe for their office. I learned how to create batch files to set IRQ interrupts for the sound and graphics cards to play games before I learned to write in cursive. I went to a "computer camp" and learned how to write games in BASIC at 8 or 9, had my first online experiences using TandyNet, and went on to create my first website in the mid-90's using HTML 0.9. It was a crazy time, but it led me to my current IT career of about 30 years.

jadbox2• 2 months ago

I had the same Tandy 1000 SX and also a Commodore 64. My parents did not approve of video game, so outside of pacman, these were equipment to learn programming when I was in my single digits. My major complaint of today's computers is that they are getting harder to harder to 'learn' coding. When you used the Commodore for example, the interface was the programming language. In a way, you HAD to learn a little bit of programming to even use it. iOS devices for a long time made local development an impossibility, although the situation has improved a bit since the early days (still no JIT allowed, but I digress).

Chronos742• 2 months ago

Yes, you really had to understand how a computer worked in order to do the most basic things that are now just taken for granted. How many people now even know what an IRQ interrupt is? Never mind writing a script to set the system parameters required just to launch a program.

dekdrop• 2 months ago

Many of us were introduced to computers as a means to use office suite - MS office - in school. Computer usage was mostly surrounded by this and other application programs. Teaching on programming the computer was not there at all. In higher class, programming was introduced, but only the syntax.

unmole• 2 months ago

The computers were very old IBM PC compatible machines, mostly with monochrome cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors. They had no hard disks at all. They had a few hundred kilobytes of RAM. Every time, we performed the same ritual. Insert a 5¼-inch floppy disk to load MS-DOS into memory. Then insert another disk to load LOGO.COM. Then write small Logo programs and watch the turtle move.

I'm a few years younger than OP and grew up in a large Indian city, but this matches my earliest experience exactly, right down to having to take our shoes off before entering the computer lab.

insane_dreamer• 2 months ago

As a child I helped my dad feed punchcards into an IBM mainframe.

But the first computer I got to work on was an AppleIIc in 1985. I started out writing production apps in dBaseII for CP/M, and later FoxPro on an IBM AT, some Pascal. Still remember the first hard drive 5Mb of storage! What in the world was one to do with all that space, when WordStar fit on a single-sided 51/4 floppy.

My first laptops were an Epson PX-8 with a micro tape for storage, and the first NEC laptop, with an 8-line display[1]. Those computers were honestly amazing.

[0] https://carleton.ca/scs/vintage-computing/item/vin81/ [1] https://carleton.ca/scs/vintage-computing/item/vin83/

Childhood Computing

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