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When you booted up an Apple II+, you were dumped immediately into a command prompt. To do ANYTHING useful, you needed to learn to type a few commands like look

by crusso 9y ago

When you booted up an Apple II+, you were dumped immediately into a command prompt. To do ANYTHING useful, you needed to learn to type a few commands like looking at the directory contents or running a program. If you just typed in the line '10 PRINT "I AM THE GREATEST!"' and then "RUN", you had a working program. Type in a '20 GOTO 10', and you were making magic happen. These days, kids turn on a computer or their phone and they have no clue as to what directories are, source code looks like, or how to do even basic things with a command line. Things are just too easy for kids these days. It reminds me of the Butterfly Struggle Story: http://instructor.mstc.edu/instructor/swallerm/Struggle%20-%20Butterfly.htm http://instructor.mstc.edu/instructor/swallerm/Struggle%20-%...

blantonl 9y ago
You could also buy magazines with 1000's of lines of Basic code that required you to simply type it in and get it working. So, programming learning methods were different. First, you had to type in all that code, and inquiring minds would eventually wonder what each of those lines did. So you would learn something new with every month's magazine that arrived in the mail. Second, you had to debug all that code you typed in, because no one can manually type in 1000's of lines of code copied from a magazine without errors. it was a fun time to learn....
- scarface74 9y ago
  It was worse. AppleSoft Basic was so limited that if you wanted to take full advantage of your computer as a programmer, you had to type in machine language hex code. I remember typing in pages of hex code to add the ability for AppleSoft basic to draw in double hires mode, another program to get more sounds from basic than the simple peek command could do, shape tables so you could write text in graphics mode, etc. At least with Basic you would get syntax errors. I never did have a real assembler for my Apple IIe. I used the built in miniassembmer to learn 65C02 assembly. But you couldn't use that to type in the assembly version of the code in magazines.
freehunter 9y ago
>Things are just too easy for kids these days. You can either have something be really difficult to learn, or you can have mass-market adoption. I'd wager that easier-to-use computers have a benefit that far outweighs any negative that comes from hiding the underlying code and commands. I don't know how to fix the bus I'm riding on if it breaks down, but that's okay because most of the time it doesn't break down and if it does, there are other people who know how to fix it. And if I wanted to learn how to fix the bus... it's really easy to open my laptop and go to YouTube and watch a video on how a bus works. There's no need to force me to build my own bus before I can ride on it. People who want to build buses will learn how to build buses. And people who want to build websites that teach you how to build a bus will learn how to build a website to teach people how to build a bus. You don't need to force them to learn it. If they want to, they will.
- crusso 9y ago
  The whole point of the article was how kids these days don't get going on learning to program until later. While I like a nice UX as much as anyone, I think that the challenge of using a computer back in the day had its beneficial outcomes.
rbanffy 9y ago
> Things are just too easy for kids these days. I think it's quite the contrary. When you booted an Apple II, a C64, you get instantly inside a REPL. In order to get into any REPL on a Windows box, you need to choose a language, find a place to download it, read instructions, install it and run it. Then you need to figure out how to run it (or compile it into something you can run). That's a huge stack of concepts even to start it. Then you may have your first contact with alien things like a "console" or, worse, have to deal with the mile-high stack of any GUI. In all fairness, I started in my early teens and, in hours, had a program. In months I had a pretty good understanding of how my Apple II+ worked. If anyone starts in their teens now, it'll take a couple years to have command of a platform.
- crusso 9y ago
  I'm not saying kids have it too easy in getting to the programming layer of a computer. I'm saying that kids have it too easy in terms of being able to use their computers without having to even learn what a command line is. The easy part is how they just turn on their computers and click the mouse at icons.

by crusso 9y ago

blantonl 9y ago

You could also buy magazines with 1000's of lines of Basic code that required you to simply type it in and get it working. So, programming learning methods were different. First, you had to type in all that code, and inquiring minds would eventually wonder what each of those lines did. So you would learn something new with every month's magazine that arrived in the mail. Second, you had to debug all that code you typed in, because no one can manually type in 1000's of lines of code copied from a magazine without errors. it was a fun time to learn....

scarface74 9y ago
It was worse. AppleSoft Basic was so limited that if you wanted to take full advantage of your computer as a programmer, you had to type in machine language hex code. I remember typing in pages of hex code to add the ability for AppleSoft basic to draw in double hires mode, another program to get more sounds from basic than the simple peek command could do, shape tables so you could write text in graphics mode, etc. At least with Basic you would get syntax errors. I never did have a real assembler for my Apple IIe. I used the built in miniassembmer to learn 65C02 assembly. But you couldn't use that to type in the assembly version of the code in magazines.

freehunter 9y ago

>Things are just too easy for kids these days. You can either have something be really difficult to learn, or you can have mass-market adoption. I'd wager that easier-to-use computers have a benefit that far outweighs any negative that comes from hiding the underlying code and commands. I don't know how to fix the bus I'm riding on if it breaks down, but that's okay because most of the time it doesn't break down and if it does, there are other people who know how to fix it. And if I wanted to learn how to fix the bus... it's really easy to open my laptop and go to YouTube and watch a video on how a bus works. There's no need to force me to build my own bus before I can ride on it. People who want to build buses will learn how to build buses. And people who want to build websites that teach you how to build a bus will learn how to build a website to teach people how to build a bus. You don't need to force them to learn it. If they want to, they will.

crusso 9y ago
The whole point of the article was how kids these days don't get going on learning to program until later. While I like a nice UX as much as anyone, I think that the challenge of using a computer back in the day had its beneficial outcomes.

rbanffy 9y ago

> Things are just too easy for kids these days. I think it's quite the contrary. When you booted an Apple II, a C64, you get instantly inside a REPL. In order to get into any REPL on a Windows box, you need to choose a language, find a place to download it, read instructions, install it and run it. Then you need to figure out how to run it (or compile it into something you can run). That's a huge stack of concepts even to start it. Then you may have your first contact with alien things like a "console" or, worse, have to deal with the mile-high stack of any GUI. In all fairness, I started in my early teens and, in hours, had a program. In months I had a pretty good understanding of how my Apple II+ worked. If anyone starts in their teens now, it'll take a couple years to have command of a platform.

crusso 9y ago
I'm not saying kids have it too easy in getting to the programming layer of a computer. I'm saying that kids have it too easy in terms of being able to use their computers without having to even learn what a command line is. The easy part is how they just turn on their computers and click the mouse at icons.