Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Childhood Computing

susam.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 133 posts

Re: Childhood Computing

#21

Post by echelon »

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.

Re: Childhood Computing

#22

Post by embedding-shape »

pixel_popping wrote: post #6

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 fundament…

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.

Re: Childhood Computing

#23

Post by Guestmodinfo »

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.

Re: Childhood Computing

#24

Post by empressplay »

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).

Re: Childhood Computing

#25

Post by pixel_popping »

embedding-shape wrote: post #22
pixel_popping wrote: post #6

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 fundament…

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.

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

Re: Childhood Computing

#26

Post by didgetmaster »

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.

Re: Childhood Computing

#27

Post by bluefirebrand »

qsera wrote: post #20

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

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

Re: Childhood Computing

#28

Post by qsera »

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.

Re: Childhood Computing

#29

Post by Jtsummers »

qsera wrote: post #28

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…

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.

Re: Childhood Computing

#30

Post by safety1st »

TrackerFF wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Post reply on HN