Computers were the most technically advanced and innovative thing a kid would see in the 80s. All their friends at school would be talking about them in some form or another. There was no distractions with smartphones or the internet either. Not so much nowadays so those times are gone.
Ask HN: Whats the modern day equivalent of 80s computer for kids to explore?
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Re: Ask HN: Whats the modern day equivalent of 80s computer for kids to explore?
#22I remember learning 6502 assembler from popular computer magazine to add myself more armored divisions and nukes in some war strategy game on C-64. Hard to imagine these days with modern games.
There's a mod scene around a lot of games. Start out liking a video game, get on some board discussing it, then find out there's people making customizations.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the modern day equivalent of 80s computer for kids to explore?
#23Small robots, Raspberry Pi, small drones: those are the things I’ve seen at high school level.
The terrifying part is that the great majority of my 9th graders are not very experienced with actual computers (laptops included). Their knowledge of computing extends no further than their phones, but because phones are so powerful, there’s nothing, particularly mysterious or compelling about computers. They were like magic boxes that you just had to figure out somehow when I was a kid.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the modern day equivalent of 80s computer for kids to explore?
#24Chatgpt ?
Re: Ask HN: Whats the modern day equivalent of 80s computer for kids to explore?
#25I wonder if this article is somehow related:
"https://www.gamesindustry.biz/machine-code-is-for-kids-artic..."
TLDR: The author (a game developer who started with BASIC on ZX Spectrum in the 80s) asked if there's a modern equivalent of BASIC with "little to no abstraction". In the past, it used to be the BASIC-asm combo.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the modern day equivalent of 80s computer for kids to explore?
#26I don’t think this experience is available any more.
The missing ingredient is not the technology, but the motivation/reward.
In the 80s/early 90s, fiddling with that system setup earned you an interactive audiovisual experience that you simply couldn’t get anywhere else, not even on TV.
Today, there is very little that kids haven’t already seen on YouTube, or that can’t be played at the click of a button.
It was an era of constraint that has now passed, and isn’t coming back.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the modern day equivalent of 80s computer for kids to explore?
#27A Rasberry Pi. The number of things you can do with these cheap computers is astronomical. You can have a Debian Linux computer and then learn networking, programming, run your own small website. Then start on hardware. Connect up various hardware devices, maybe starting with just a fan. Turn on. Turn off. A second monitor, larger disks. Webrtc. On an on.
You never know what kinds of things kids will like. They may like building a website. Or getting the fan to turn. Or setting the prompt to "hey dude?".
My own experience is that kids like to do things - to see some result. They don't get much of that these days, so anything to encourage that vs being a clickbait consumer is good.
As for games, there were old Freddy Fish, Monkey Island games. Putt-putt does whatever was a favorite. I have not run retro-pi or whatever but I think many of those things are still available.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the modern day equivalent of 80s computer for kids to explore?
#28I’m a Dad who grew up in the 80s and the problem is us, the parents. My parents didn’t push me to get into computing, I just found it fascinating. If we try to find things like gentle introductions, it’s likely to get more kids to a base level familiarity but all of the real learning was in reading a 256 page manual as an 8 year old so I could get StarCraft to work on my highly custom rig. Parents as the driving forc…
Computers weren’t on my radar until my grandmother surprised me with one. I came home from school and there lay 2 huge boxes. I was on my own from there.
I was given the opportunity.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the modern day equivalent of 80s computer for kids to explore?
#29Browser Developer Tools -- a javascript REPL and a familiar environment (any website)
Definitely. Javascript is absolutely the modern analogue of '80s BASIC. Comes built-in to the computer/browser with no need to install anything, interpreted language with no need for any kind of toolchain, emphasizes ease of use (even when that comes at a detriment to things that language purists like -- e.g., strong typing), has metric tons of example code to do all kinds of cool things...
Re: Ask HN: Whats the modern day equivalent of 80s computer for kids to explore?
#30I’m a Dad who grew up in the 80s and the problem is us, the parents. My parents didn’t push me to get into computing, I just found it fascinating. If we try to find things like gentle introductions, it’s likely to get more kids to a base level familiarity but all of the real learning was in reading a 256 page manual as an 8 year old so I could get StarCraft to work on my highly custom rig. Parents as the driving forc…
>>Parents as the driving force simply won’t work.
I keep seeing that myth. Most of the people I know studies the same as their parents, inspired by them. Specially what catches in kids are hobbies. I have lots of friend which are professional or semi professional musicians. All of them got the playing of the instrument from the parents.