Childhood Computing

Some of my fondest memories as a young kid was hacking away at an 800mhz machine my dad bought me. Certainly a lot of time was wasted, but my knowledge of the system was also helped a bit.

Seeing kids nowadays interfacing with just a touch screen makes me fearful that a foundation of knowledge is not being built, even among the more nerdy types.

People forget how locked down the systems were until Borland and finally GNU gcc entered the market (Unless you went Masm or Pascal.) I remember the MS visual C++ and VB manuals with compilers were over $8k/seat at one point (would be almost twice that in today dollars).

People sometimes underestimate how important search engines are to build applications without official documentation.

Supporting FOSS is more than a convenience for some, as most remember locked ecosystems were not fun at any age. I remember GW-Basic and VB3.0 made building programs easy for kids, but it had other issues besides the license cost. Prior to Visual studio, making standalone binaries was simply too difficult for most until the Internet.

Now the average AAA game is around 40GiB on Steam, and g++/clang is the standard tool-suites. Fun times, =3

These books should be rewritten for a modern platform: https://usborne.com/za/books/computer-and-coding-books

I spent much time carefully typing these things in (spy games, horror games, etc), then even more time designing my own adventure games after reading the adventure titles.

My first computer was an Access Matrix that I'd play on at my dad's office. It was such a neat computer back in the day as a proto-laptop with built-in modem and printer.

A 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 people making creative decisions and doing creative, technical, intellectual work to bring ideas to life.

Lots of stimulating books and messaging for children focus on how things in society and in the physical world come to be. Holes are dug, resources are gathered and processed, smart people create complex things including machines that create even more complex things. People perform hard labor to achieve amazing things. People gather, form consensus, and create social structures and government. People have ideas and create art. People observe problems and create solutions.

Children internalize this messaging and develop an appreciation and understanding of how effort, creativity and intelligence result in amazing things that make everyone's lives better, but (in my opinion) that messaging was never sufficiently updated to ensure that that appreciation and understanding extends to software, which increasingly runs our world. We don't put enough effort into showing children that their favorite games, all the stuff in all the menus on our phones, all the software they use to learn or communicate or play, all of it is made by people who had ideas, made design decisions, and then made them real through accumulated wisdom and great intellectual effort.

Not every kid needs to "learn to code", but they should all learn that everything they look at and tap on their screens was made by people who did, and who wanted to make things to solve problems and make life better.

It's unfortunate that the rise of AI slop has complicated this message; that's all I'll say about that.