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Childhood Computing
91–100 of 133 posts
Re: Childhood Computing
#92A 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 pe…
very good point, but I think the message has been complicated long before AI slop, from the rise of tablets and social media platforms.
Re: Childhood Computing
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 pe…
Ok, just waiting on some Indian lad whose parents didn't work for ussr state software engineering to chime in, and put this guy in his place, and i can write my post-post-python class decontruction.
>Ok, just waiting on some Indian lad whose parents didn't work for ussr state software engineering to chime in, and put this guy in his place, and i can write my post-post-python class decontruction.
Not sure what you're talking about, and who needs to be put in their place, and why you'd want an Indian to chime in, but OK.
My point was that when it comes to careet, the parent commentor owes a lot more to their parents than strokes of luck and how tinkerable computers were back in the day.
They did attribute their success to luck though, instead of going for the usual self-made-man myth, so I don't know what place they need to be put in either.
Re: Childhood Computing
#94I 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!
Re: Childhood Computing
#95One 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…
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.
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.
Re: Childhood Computing
#96Does 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.
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.
Re: Childhood Computing
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 reaso…
>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 pe…
My parents were broke. I grew up on food stamps. Mom worked retail. Dad had a few good years, his business went bust and we spent a decade below the poverty line.
It was a public high school in the USA. It was in a rich neighborhood on the other side of town; our neighborhood was below median income and had one of the worst high schools in the state. My parents encouraged me to apply for attendance at the school across town via a magnet program. I got in and took a public bus 80 minutes each way for 4 years.
I'm not relating this in order to validate precisely what my Privilege Index was. Rather to relate how public investment in resources which were available to anyone who was willing to make a bit of extra effort transformed at least one kid's life. It seems these days that public resources go mostly to those with the most money, or maybe those who were born into the politically correct group du jour, but almost never to the random kid who just wants to take a shot at doing something bigger.
I'm glad I was born when I was. Public policy has changed, that magnet program is now gone, that rich kid school is now for the rich kids only, and it has gone to the dogs in terms of academic performance.
Re: Childhood Computing
#98I 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 loa…
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.
A hard drive for the c64? Are you sure you didn’t mean the floppy disk drive?
Re: Childhood Computing
#99I 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 doll…
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.
Re: Childhood Computing
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 reaso…
> 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…
Raspberry Pi has a proprietary boot process and GPU.