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Childhood Computing

susam.net

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Re: Childhood Computing

#61

Post by anthk »

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.

Classes where undertood under Inform6 (a literal OOP language compiling against ZMachine, for text adventures -even more, as Tetris, Madbomber...) with two lines.

Re: Childhood Computing

#62

Post by mfld »

Does 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.

Re: Childhood Computing

#63

Post by darepublic »

In 92 as I recall my school's unremarkable computer lab had apple iis and Macintosh mix. We never learned any programming we wrote essays in word software and got to play kidpix, Carmen San Diego, Oregon trail if we were good

Re: Childhood Computing

#64

Post by nosioptar »

mfld wrote: post #62

Does 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.

It's been a long time, but I remember it a bit.

I also remember running over to the neighbor's to make a copy of a working config file after effing up my config file. (Himem.sys?)

Re: Childhood Computing

#65

Post by vunderba »

echelon wrote: post #21

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…

Awesome, you're one of the few people who played nearly the same set of games I did. My favorite was probably The Island of Dr. Brain, though all of the Dr. Brain games were great as a kid.

One particularly hilarious part was right at the beginning of Island of Dr. Brain, back in the old-school days of manual-based copyright protection. The game would give you longitude and latitude coordinates, and you had to look them up in the manual to figure out where you were supposed to parachute. If you got it wrong, your character would just splash into the ocean.

I actually referenced The Island of Dr. Brain in something I made about a year ago. I don’t know if you played it, but it has a jigsaw puzzle as one of the mini-games. It was one of the most unusual jigsaw puzzles I’d ever seen: an animated jigsaw, where the entire image was a effectively looping "cinemagraph". One of the first things LLM-assisted projects I put together was a jigsaw puzzle game with about a dozen custom animated jigsaw puzzles. Link is in my profile.

This is a bit of a deep cut, but my most distinct memory of Super Solvers: Midnight Rescue in DOS was that it used the PC speaker to play “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” If you did anything that triggered a sound effect like jumping the music would immediately reset and start over. It was like a weird, primitive version of scratching a vinyl record as if you were some kind of amateur PC-speaker DJ. (and kind of the opposite of Dig-Dug)

Re: Childhood Computing

#66

Post by anthk »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #43
cube00 wrote: 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…

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…

Most people either pirated Visual C/C++ or got GNU/Linux with tons of devel packages and amateur books (Learn C as if you were a freshman in College) or something like that.

Re: Childhood Computing

#67

Post by anthk »

Also, on Logo, it's like the jump from C64 basic or CP/M Basic to VB6 but on steroids. UCB logo and manuals can be up to an SICP-lite level.

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html

Ah, yes, moving a turtle and yaddah yaddah. Yes, you have it, and material on par (I am no kidding) to "Intro to symbolic computation" from the Common Lisp world. The 3rd volume can be hardcore compared to what I learnt in Elementary with Logo.

Re: Childhood Computing

#68

Post by anthk »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #57
safety1st wrote: post #30

Earlier 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…

A silver lining is that Javascript code will run on any modern browser+OS and can be created with nothing but a text editor. Even though this is many degrees of abstraction from facing the bare metal that was there in the 80s and 90s, it's better than nothing.

Windows XP (since SP2? )came with a C# compiler and it was pretty much ignored, CSC.exe.

A bit less with Perl and Python under *nixes where the Idle was about two clicks away.

With C# you would get far more performance and much better support.

Re: Childhood Computing

#69

Post by alterom »

safety1st wrote: post #30
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 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 people don't get to have.

I did; my mom was a software engineer in the USSR, and I grew up in the 1990s Ukraine with a PC at home, and went to a great high school in Odesa, and later, in Brooklyn when we immigrated.

Like @susam, I played Digger on IBM PC 286 as my first game when I was 4.

I have a PhD in math and Google/Meta/MS on my resume today.

I owe this to many strokes of luck, but how tinkerable the PCs were was not the most significant one by far.

The most important part was access to production tech, seeing it used, and having a role model that made it a natural consideration as a career choice.

And the "luck" of what was available in my K12 was 100% the work of my parents who got me into those schools.

Credit where credit is due, dude.

Re: Childhood Computing

#70

Post by gesis »

steve1977 wrote: post #44
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 once discovered where the texts for our touch typing exams were saved on the network. Made for some funny exams afterwards... Edit: well, funny for my adolescent self...

We did the opposite.

Once the source texts were found, we changed them all to short sequences of home row keys.

Everyone began typing at 300+ wpm.

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