Childhood Computing
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Childhood Computing
1–10 of 133 posts
Re: Childhood Computing
#2That smell thing is so real. I still get hit with it randomly and I'm immediately 10 years old again
Re: Childhood Computing
#3It's striking how concise the program in the first video is. Also I had no idea "Digger" existed. I've only ever known Dig Dug in that style.
Re: Childhood Computing
#4Love this! You've inspired me to write my own blog post about my early days with an Amiga (1000?). I wonder how many of us have similar experiences.
Re: Childhood Computing
#5I had many similar experiences, but almost a decade earlier. At grade school we had Apple 2s with Logo, Oregon Trail and other education classics. My junior high was a small parochial school that still had TRS-80s in 1988, along with some apples. My freshman year of high school was in a well funded district in Chicago suburbs. They had Macs with Excel and Word - we wrote lab reports in science classes with our data input and graphed in excel and the graphs pasted into the word doc reports - in 1990.
Re: Childhood Computing
#6I'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 fundamentals of computing are understood as early as possible, this is what allows you to understand how the world is interconnected.
Re: Childhood Computing
#7Good old time :)
Re: Childhood Computing
#8I 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 dollars for a MSDN academic subscription just to get Visual Basic.
I guess the blessing was instead of Windows apps we made web pages and JavaScript games hosted on our parents ISP webhost accounts while we dreamed of the day we'd have enough money to buy our own .com domain.
Re: Childhood Computing
#9For me it was the view source era. Around 2001 I was copying HTML from Geocities pages and modifying them in Notepad. I didn't know what a programming language was but I knew how to change the background color and add a marquee. That instant feedback loop -- save, alt-tab, refresh -- was enough to get me hooked.
Re: Childhood Computing
#10I miss those days. Oregon trail was the first game I played on the computer in 1993 (there was a computer in our Kindergarten class).
Nostalgia for the old web - building websites in HTML on Angelfire and Expage.com. Learning programming on visual basic and how to copy and paste to welcome people to the site and to sign the guestbook…