I had to give a talk on coding a few years back. I brought in my Acorn Atom to show people what I started on. 12Kb of memory, no hard drive, no sound card, no n

I had to give a talk on coding a few years back. I brought in my Acorn Atom to show people what I started on. 12Kb of memory, no hard drive, no sound card, no network, monochrome display. The BASIC language it knew had maybe 10 keywords, and the Assember had another couple dozen commands. Everything in the computer was simple, easily understood, and robust (turning the computer off wiped everything except the ROM - essentially a factory reset every time). I compared that to my phone - 256Gb of storage, 32Gb of memory, plus sound, graphics, wifi, and the kitchen sink. Learning on the Atom was easy because it was so simple. And as I mastered it, so computers became more complicated. It was, in many ways, the perfect method of teaching tech. A new programmer nowadays has to learn so much so quickly to be able to write anything useful, it's often overwhelming. Trying to teach my gf how to code was painful because we were always bumping into rabbit holes of complexity, which we could either go down and waste whole days, or avoid and leave an area of ignorance that would bite later. I never had that problem. It's humbling - I wonder if I would even be a dev if I hadn't had that advantage?