I'm right on the border of "younger generation" but I got my start when I discovered my parents' computer had Visual Basic 6 and found a bunch of tutorials onli

I'm right on the border of "younger generation" but I got my start when I discovered my parents' computer had Visual Basic 6 and found a bunch of tutorials online from making simple games like tic-tac-toe, progressing to word processors and networked chat programs. There's something to be said about how easy it was in Visual Studio to put a GUI together... Kids get grounded and less outdoor play time for punishment--I got Visual Studio uninstalled. On the simpler side, plenty of my friends got started in the early 2000's with Texas Instruments graphing calculator Basic. I'm glad to see the ticalc.org scene is still alive, but recall that the really magical stuff was almost always intimidatingly written in assembly! Edit: ...And perhaps not surprisingly, I went to ticalc.org to see that TI is locking down their ecosystem as well and removing native code execution. Obviously today's world has more out there for learning and tinkering despite all these walled gardens, but the flipside is that each microcosm is relative obscure compared to the past when there were a handful of mainstream ways to learn to hack and each was just as welcoming or intimidating as the other.