Indeed. My dad worked at Bell labs in the 1970's and when I was in third
grade he brought home a TRS80 Model 1 Level 1 to do work on. It had a
game on cassette called space war or something that I always wanted to
play but he had to load it. Finally he taught me how to CLOAD to get me
out of his hair so I could play it.
When I got bored I found the other game he had for it on cassette:
"Introduction to programming". And that night my parents came into the
living room to find me running my first program: Termites. Which would
fill the screen then randomly turn off pixels to simulate termites
eating your house down....
Got better from there. But I still value basic for the quick use of MID$
and Len(x$) to quickly parse strings of text.
CZ
On 4/6/2020 11:09 PM, Adam Thornton via cctalk wrote:
On Apr 6, 2020, at 10:00 AM, cctalk-requ...@classiccmp.org wrote:
They play with the
pennies to discover that they can roll around, and learn that they're not
food or nasal suppositories,
I was with you up till here, but wait, what?
I’m one of those kids who was just the right age.
Five years older and I would have been in the Car Club, and would have ended up
being a damn good mechanic without a lot of career opportunities.
Five years later and not every damn computer on the planet would have come with
a BASIC interpreter in ROM and who knows what my tinkering instinct would have
led to.
But I, born in 1971, had an Atari 2600 and its BASIC programming cartridge, and
in the fall on 1982 I got a VIC-20, and sometime in 1983 my parent bought me an
Apple //e.
So I did grow up with Microsoft BASIC as my first language, and, sure, it
doesn’t lend itself well to structured programming, but then when I wanted to
know “well how do you do _that_?” I ended up in 6502 assembly, and picked up
P-System PASCAL and Logo along the way. Then in the summer of ’89 I interned
in a physics department, and got OK at Turbo Pascal and
sort-of-vaguely-able-to-write C.
College brought REXX on (IBM VM/CMS; I didn’t get an Amiga until the 2010s,
well after its relevance) and Perl and Scheme and SPARC assembly, and grad
school (both for irrelevant degrees: Ancient Mediterranean Civilization and
History…but wait, there’s a footnote) 680x0 assembly and Java. (The footnote
is, well history of computing, so I got a lot of deep-dive stuff into other
languages and architectures.) Since then, whatever I needed to learn when I
needed to learn it. I’ve programmed COBOL for money, which has joined the
ranks of things I’m not super-proud to have done for money but hey it paid the
bills when I needed it.
Since then…Python, C, Go, TypeScript, whatever was needed. These days it’s
mostly Python.
But really what it was was that I was lucky enough to be in that small age
window where computers were, one the one hand, something middle-class families
could afford while still being capable of doing cool things, and on the other
hand, simple enough that a smart adolescent could pretty much understand them
more-or-less in their entirety.
Adam
