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Childhood Computing

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11–20 of 133 posts

Re: Childhood Computing

#11
post #8

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…

...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 :)

Re: Childhood Computing

#12

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

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.

Re: Childhood Computing

#13
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)

Re: Childhood Computing

#14
post #8

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…

They were too busy taking BASIC away from others:

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

Re: Childhood Computing

#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 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.

Re: Childhood Computing

#16
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.

Re: Childhood Computing

#17
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.

Re: Childhood Computing

#18
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...

Re: Childhood Computing

#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.

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