Childhood Computing

raghavchamadiya

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

king_geedorah

It'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.

kj4211cash

Love 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.

jeremyjh

I 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.

pixel_popping

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 fundamentals of computing are understood as early as possible, this is what allows you to understand how the world is interconnected.

sonnyproto

Good old time :)

cube00

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 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.

Enivel

For 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.

k2xl

I 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 <marquee> to welcome people to the site and to sign the guestbook…

WillAdams

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)

TrackerFF

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.

bsoles

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.

anthk

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.

pelasaco

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...

qsera

As computers grew more powerful, they became less interesting. There is a lesson in there somewhere that humanity has not yet woken up to.

echelon

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 Encyclopedia virtual maze - Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (I hated it; I learned to type when I got onto IGN Boards, EZboards, AIM, and IRC.) - King's Quest VII (this counts as educational logic puzzles, right?) - MechWarrior II (well, I considered it educational...) I'm envious of kids today growing up with LLMs and vibe coding. I would have had a blast at that age with the tools we have today.

Guestmodinfo

You seem to be writing about me :) I also lived a very similar childhood. Class 10 computer science Board paper I prepared using pen and paper computing only. The only difference is that I had BASIC, instead of LOGO. Another difference is that I was not in an industrial town. Since sometimes you write in your posts about growing up in a small industrial town. I have a hunch you grew up in Jamshedpur in Jharkhand state.

empressplay

I was lucky enough to be an autistic kid in the 1980s with access to a steady stream of new and novel computers: Apple II, Sinclair, Commodore, Atari, TI, Macintosh... kept me engaged and off the 'short bus'. If I had been born ten years earlier I'm certain my life would have been dramatically different (in a very bad way).

didgetmaster

I remember playing Digger on my IBM PC clone sold by AT&T (6300) back in 1987 or 1988. I also remember that the game speed was set to some factor of the computer's clock speed. When I later tried to run the same game after I upgraded my hardware, the game went so fast, you could not even play it.

qsera

One thing that was nice about the graphics programming those days was that when you drew something on the screen, it remained there until your program erased it. This means that you could create cool looking graphics easily. For example, you can just compute the points of a circle and draw the points one by one, and in the screen it will show a full circle being drawn. "Modern" graphics libs (even SDL I think), made this impossible by having redraw the whole screen every frame so that now my program has to remember all the points there the program drew before to get the same effect. The former workflow made graphics programming so much fun for me and I find the modern "fast rendering pipeline" boring and not a lot of fun. Things like that, one by one, have sucked the whole fun out of computing.