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 doll…
Childhood Computing
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Re: Childhood Computing
#12That smell thing is so real. I still get hit with it randomly and I'm immediately 10 years old again
Re: Childhood Computing
#13https://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)
Re: Childhood Computing
#14I 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…
Re: Childhood Computing
#15Our 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.
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#20There is a lesson in there somewhere that humanity has not yet woken up to.