7 ms·

A common sentiment on HN (and other programming-centric communities) is nostalgia for early computing days, and specifically, how easy it was to become a progra

A common sentiment on HN (and other programming-centric communities) is nostalgia for early computing days, and specifically, how easy it was to become a programmer. You turned on your Commodore and it booted into a BASIC prompt, for example. No webpack/babel/toolchain nightmare between you and making a computer do things. But as someone who started programming as a kid in the late 80s/early 90s, I think this nostalgia vastly understates how many barriers existed between enjoying doing things in BASIC and moving forward to different levels or paradigms of programming. I was made vaguely aware of the existence of C by computing magazines, but the idea of actually buying a C compiler was totally out of the question. My high school had Pascal available, but nothing else. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 90s that the internet and open source evolved to the point where programming languages and tools became ubiquitous to the point where you stopped thinking about how you might acquire them.

harikb 5y ago
On the other hand, lack of internet allowed one to "borrow" (pirate) software from a friend who had it. No sign in required to ones Jetbrains account.
cube00 5y ago
I remember wanting to create Windows applications but couldn't because Visual Studio (or Visual Basic) was so expensive. The only "free" alternative was to code it in assembly[1] which wasn't exactly easy beyond "Hello World" [1] https://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm https://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm
- jdminhbg 5y ago
  Yes. Even once I was in college in the late 90s, to get my own copy of Visual Studio was hundreds of dollars — discounted in the university book store for students from full retail, but still prohibitive for a college student.
ghaff 5y ago
To put some numbers to it, I bought a computer in the early 80s. No hard disk but it was still probably about $4K or so by the time you threw in a dot matrix printer and any other hardware, e.g. modem. I was actually working at the time but, as an engineer, my salary was about $25K. A PC clone was a significant investment. By the late 90s, I was in tech (as a product manager) and was making about double that. But a hard disk drive was still in the thousands of dollars and a compiler/assembler/debugger was still in the many hundreds of dollars range. And probably spend another few hundred on books because that's mostly what you needed if you wanted to look things up. Some of this you could copy of course. (Though the software came with a shelf full of manuals you sort of needed.) But you were still easily looking at a $10K+ investment in today's dollars to get into "serious" programming on your own. ADDED: There were ways to cut the costs of software especially but still a lot of money.
- mgerdts 5y ago
  In about 1994 for about $3000 I built a PC with a Pentium 90 with 8 MB of RAM and a hard drive that was somewhere in the 80 to 120 MB range. Running Linux, it was much faster than the Sun IPC, IPX, SPARC 5, SPARC 10, and the single processor SPARC 20 systems I had access to. This may be because I was the only user on my PC and the workstations were commonly used via telnet. In any case, my personal computer was faster for me than almost any machine that I had access to as a sysadmin in a well funded academic computing center. The 386sx that I acquired a couple years earlier had a 60 MB hard drive. Surely the hard drive in that was not thousands of dollars. If you needed gigabytes of hard drive space at the time, that cost thousands. More modest drives were available for a few hundred.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yeah. Mid to late 90s, thousands is high. Mea culpa. It's one of those things where the exact date matters because the prices dropped quickly. In 1982, I bought a 5MB hard drive for my company for $5K. (I didn't personally have one at the time.) At some point I bought a 40MB or so drive but don't remember when or what it cost.) Machrone's Law was that the computer you want always costs $5,000 (in then dollars) which held pretty well for a long time. So, yeah, most of us probably spent $3-4K at a given point in time, modulo being able to bring older parts forward.
mikewarot 5y ago
I started programming in 1981. I bought Turbo Pascal up through Delphi 7. That's all the software I needed to develop and support a commercial application for a decade that was used to report equipment inspections in Electric Utilities. Computer systems, peripherals, floppy disks, etc. were more expensive back then, before mass production and larger markets drove down prices. Retail software prices, for me, were a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of it.
abecedarius 5y ago
Turbo C went for <$100 new when I bought it around 1987. Admittedly I only ever shelled out for a handful of programs in those days (of which that one was totally worth it), and of course people's resources vary.
- jefftk 5y ago
  Which is "<$240" in 2021 dollars
  - II2II 5y ago
    I convinced my family to sign some papers so I could get a "real job" around the age of 12, working at my middle school, and doing computer repair for complete strangers as a teen just to save up for software. That included Borland C++, which cost considerably more than Turbo C++. As an added benefit, my family knew that I was keeping out of trouble. There's not much trouble you can get into when you're going to school, working, or sitting in front of a computer (at least in the pre-online era).
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    Sure. A good C compiler for free was a real advance. But in the 80s a parent didn't need to be unusually clueful to guess that for a kid wanting Turbo C, it'd be a good bet as an investment in their future -- not like a kid's phone or tablet now.
- darig 5y ago
  Corel got a chunk of my money back then too
brandonmenc 5y ago
> I was made vaguely aware of the existence of C This exactly. When I was in grade school programming games in BASIC in the late 80s, my dad heard from a programmer friend at work that the C language was good for graphics. It took me a few more years to actually put two and two together and acquire a copy of Turbo C. Then I actually had to learn the thing, which meant many walks to the brand new Barnes and Noble with a spiral bound notebook and a pen so that I could hand copy information out of books I couldn't afford. The good old days! EDIT: > You turned on your Commodore and it booted into a BASIC prompt This is also very true. You really could just be like, 8 years old and boot right into a simple programming interface and type some programs from a magazine (and tweak and edit them) and the computer did amazing things. There is no equivalent of this today.
- Brentward 5y ago
  > There is no equivalent of this today. I started using computers much more recently, but wouldn't any OS that boots into a TTY provide a pretty similar experience? I'm genuinely curious since I've never used a Commodore or BASIC. Is that environment much different from bash or another shell?
  - taeric 5y ago
    No, because there is no graphics in a tty. Something as simple as a dragon curve would be relatively difficult to get going nowadays. That is, this is certainly close. But still a far cry from the environments we used to have. I remember typing in screensaver style programs from magazines. Closest I know today would be Wireframe magazine and how it uses pygame zero. Which is awesome, but I don't know a computer that boots to that.
  - brandonmenc 5y ago
    It's very different. Booting into BASIC is the equivalent of booting into an IDE. But one that a child could understand with a single page of instructions. It's kind of hard to explain because computers were so simple that you didn't really need a shell. But as someone who was there as a kid, I can say with certainty that there is no way I'd have been able to write a shell script back when I was writing BASIC programs that had loops and graphics.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
II2II 5y ago
I see the cost of and lack of awareness of development tools outside of BASIC as a bit of an advantage since it enforced focusing upon learning how to program. There were no shiny tools distracting the budding developer. When I did learn about languages other than BASIC/assembler I did my research and saved up for one of those expensive compilers, which was no simple feat having grown up in a family of limited means. I don't know what's best for the long term growth of software developers: the mandated focus due to scarce resources or sophisticated tools that are freely available to facilitate further learning. What I do know is, "where should I start?" is one of the most frequently asked questions these days. It is a question that far fewer people had to ask thirty or forty years ago.
taeric 5y ago
I think you sort of beg the question on whether or not similar barriers still exist. My assertion is that for raw performance and capability, computers have gotten more financially accessible. However, for creative activities, things are still difficult. In many ways, more so? That is, consumption has never been cheaper. Creation, though, remains relatively high. Probably still lower than ever, but still prohibitively high. As a fun example, I remember coding fractals as a kid. I cannot think of how to do that right off, anymore. And I don't remember when I lost the knowledge of how to do this. :(
- ghaff 5y ago
  Maybe. OTOH, type "python fractals" into Google and this is the first hit: https://towardsdatascience.com/creating-fractals-with-python-d2b663786da6 https://towardsdatascience.com/creating-fractals-with-python... And if that doesn't seem the right approach--or is too high level--I'm sure there are many other ways.
  - taeric 5y ago
    Python and a few of it's libraries are certainly the closest to this I can think of on commodity computers. (To wit, I think you can just import turtle to get a logo.) Now, imagine teaching an eight year old to update their home computer so that this works. And realize that that was common for many home computers back in the day.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      It's simpler than anything beyond using the built-in BASIC interpreter was. Which also wasn't very good. And was arguably a fairly poor platform to learn programming on--although myself and many others did. (Though in my case on a teletype hooked up to a mini rather than a local computer.)
      - taeric 5y ago
        The built in basic interpreter, though, could do this. My kids couldn't get python installed last I asked them to try, is the point. Now, web based setups are surely advanced in capabilities for them. But, only if you know what garden to enter. I'm a fan of scratch. The kids have gotten hilariously lost when the browser is accidentally closed. Granted, I got lost some on the computers in the header school lab. Power cycling worked rather well to get me back to interpreter.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yibg 5y ago
Yea looking back I think the barrier is so much lower today. I started programming in basic as well. While it was fun and fairly easy to get started, pretty quickly I hit a wall. After doing some basic things I ran out of ideas on what to build next and there weren't many resources to guide me. There weren't any online tutorials or online courses to help you to keep moving. So pretty soon I gave up on it and didn't come back to it until well into college.
psyc 5y ago
After several years of BASIC, I saved up and bought Watcom C++. At IIRC $600 (1995 dollars), it was literally the single largest purchase I’d ever made to date. As it turned out, I made a zillion-fold return on that particular investment, at least. The first thing I did with it was port one of my simple 3D graphics demos from BASIC to C. My god the feeling of disbelief and raw power when it ran at like 1000 FPS.
bin_bash 5y ago
This is Fading Affect Bias in action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fading_affect_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fading_affect_bias
tluyben2 5y ago
Yes, but I was selling games and 'business software' (for stamp collectors, book shops, schools; all of them were databases written from scratch for that exact goal) written in a mix of basic and asm for most of the 80s and I needed nothing but 1 book and my MSX (both I still own and the msx still works). This is at least half a decade with 1 book and 1 computer making money with software. No internet and, for a large part, no BBSs either (for me).

harikb 5y ago

On the other hand, lack of internet allowed one to "borrow" (pirate) software from a friend who had it. No sign in required to ones Jetbrains account.

cube00 5y ago

I remember wanting to create Windows applications but couldn't because Visual Studio (or Visual Basic) was so expensive. The only "free" alternative was to code it in assembly[1] which wasn't exactly easy beyond "Hello World" [1] https://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm https://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm

jdminhbg 5y ago
Yes. Even once I was in college in the late 90s, to get my own copy of Visual Studio was hundreds of dollars — discounted in the university book store for students from full retail, but still prohibitive for a college student.

ghaff 5y ago

To put some numbers to it, I bought a computer in the early 80s. No hard disk but it was still probably about $4K or so by the time you threw in a dot matrix printer and any other hardware, e.g. modem. I was actually working at the time but, as an engineer, my salary was about $25K. A PC clone was a significant investment. By the late 90s, I was in tech (as a product manager) and was making about double that. But a hard disk drive was still in the thousands of dollars and a compiler/assembler/debugger was still in the many hundreds of dollars range. And probably spend another few hundred on books because that's mostly what you needed if you wanted to look things up. Some of this you could copy of course. (Though the software came with a shelf full of manuals you sort of needed.) But you were still easily looking at a $10K+ investment in today's dollars to get into "serious" programming on your own. ADDED: There were ways to cut the costs of software especially but still a lot of money.

mgerdts 5y ago
In about 1994 for about $3000 I built a PC with a Pentium 90 with 8 MB of RAM and a hard drive that was somewhere in the 80 to 120 MB range. Running Linux, it was much faster than the Sun IPC, IPX, SPARC 5, SPARC 10, and the single processor SPARC 20 systems I had access to. This may be because I was the only user on my PC and the workstations were commonly used via telnet. In any case, my personal computer was faster for me than almost any machine that I had access to as a sysadmin in a well funded academic computing center. The 386sx that I acquired a couple years earlier had a 60 MB hard drive. Surely the hard drive in that was not thousands of dollars. If you needed gigabytes of hard drive space at the time, that cost thousands. More modest drives were available for a few hundred.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yeah. Mid to late 90s, thousands is high. Mea culpa. It's one of those things where the exact date matters because the prices dropped quickly. In 1982, I bought a 5MB hard drive for my company for $5K. (I didn't personally have one at the time.) At some point I bought a 40MB or so drive but don't remember when or what it cost.) Machrone's Law was that the computer you want always costs $5,000 (in then dollars) which held pretty well for a long time. So, yeah, most of us probably spent $3-4K at a given point in time, modulo being able to bring older parts forward.

mikewarot 5y ago

I started programming in 1981. I bought Turbo Pascal up through Delphi 7. That's all the software I needed to develop and support a commercial application for a decade that was used to report equipment inspections in Electric Utilities. Computer systems, peripherals, floppy disks, etc. were more expensive back then, before mass production and larger markets drove down prices. Retail software prices, for me, were a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of it.

abecedarius 5y ago

Turbo C went for <$100 new when I bought it around 1987. Admittedly I only ever shelled out for a handful of programs in those days (of which that one was totally worth it), and of course people's resources vary.

jefftk 5y ago
Which is "<$240" in 2021 dollars
- II2II 5y ago
  I convinced my family to sign some papers so I could get a "real job" around the age of 12, working at my middle school, and doing computer repair for complete strangers as a teen just to save up for software. That included Borland C++, which cost considerably more than Turbo C++. As an added benefit, my family knew that I was keeping out of trouble. There's not much trouble you can get into when you're going to school, working, or sitting in front of a computer (at least in the pre-online era).
- abecedarius 5y ago
  Sure. A good C compiler for free was a real advance. But in the 80s a parent didn't need to be unusually clueful to guess that for a kid wanting Turbo C, it'd be a good bet as an investment in their future -- not like a kid's phone or tablet now.
darig 5y ago
Corel got a chunk of my money back then too

brandonmenc 5y ago

> I was made vaguely aware of the existence of C This exactly. When I was in grade school programming games in BASIC in the late 80s, my dad heard from a programmer friend at work that the C language was good for graphics. It took me a few more years to actually put two and two together and acquire a copy of Turbo C. Then I actually had to learn the thing, which meant many walks to the brand new Barnes and Noble with a spiral bound notebook and a pen so that I could hand copy information out of books I couldn't afford. The good old days! EDIT: > You turned on your Commodore and it booted into a BASIC prompt This is also very true. You really could just be like, 8 years old and boot right into a simple programming interface and type some programs from a magazine (and tweak and edit them) and the computer did amazing things. There is no equivalent of this today.

Brentward 5y ago
> There is no equivalent of this today. I started using computers much more recently, but wouldn't any OS that boots into a TTY provide a pretty similar experience? I'm genuinely curious since I've never used a Commodore or BASIC. Is that environment much different from bash or another shell?
- taeric 5y ago
  No, because there is no graphics in a tty. Something as simple as a dragon curve would be relatively difficult to get going nowadays. That is, this is certainly close. But still a far cry from the environments we used to have. I remember typing in screensaver style programs from magazines. Closest I know today would be Wireframe magazine and how it uses pygame zero. Which is awesome, but I don't know a computer that boots to that.
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  It's very different. Booting into BASIC is the equivalent of booting into an IDE. But one that a child could understand with a single page of instructions. It's kind of hard to explain because computers were so simple that you didn't really need a shell. But as someone who was there as a kid, I can say with certainty that there is no way I'd have been able to write a shell script back when I was writing BASIC programs that had loops and graphics.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

II2II 5y ago

I see the cost of and lack of awareness of development tools outside of BASIC as a bit of an advantage since it enforced focusing upon learning how to program. There were no shiny tools distracting the budding developer. When I did learn about languages other than BASIC/assembler I did my research and saved up for one of those expensive compilers, which was no simple feat having grown up in a family of limited means. I don't know what's best for the long term growth of software developers: the mandated focus due to scarce resources or sophisticated tools that are freely available to facilitate further learning. What I do know is, "where should I start?" is one of the most frequently asked questions these days. It is a question that far fewer people had to ask thirty or forty years ago.

taeric 5y ago

I think you sort of beg the question on whether or not similar barriers still exist. My assertion is that for raw performance and capability, computers have gotten more financially accessible. However, for creative activities, things are still difficult. In many ways, more so? That is, consumption has never been cheaper. Creation, though, remains relatively high. Probably still lower than ever, but still prohibitively high. As a fun example, I remember coding fractals as a kid. I cannot think of how to do that right off, anymore. And I don't remember when I lost the knowledge of how to do this. :(

ghaff 5y ago
Maybe. OTOH, type "python fractals" into Google and this is the first hit: https://towardsdatascience.com/creating-fractals-with-python-d2b663786da6 https://towardsdatascience.com/creating-fractals-with-python... And if that doesn't seem the right approach--or is too high level--I'm sure there are many other ways.
- taeric 5y ago
  Python and a few of it's libraries are certainly the closest to this I can think of on commodity computers. (To wit, I think you can just import turtle to get a logo.) Now, imagine teaching an eight year old to update their home computer so that this works. And realize that that was common for many home computers back in the day.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    It's simpler than anything beyond using the built-in BASIC interpreter was. Which also wasn't very good. And was arguably a fairly poor platform to learn programming on--although myself and many others did. (Though in my case on a teletype hooked up to a mini rather than a local computer.)
    - taeric 5y ago
      The built in basic interpreter, though, could do this. My kids couldn't get python installed last I asked them to try, is the point. Now, web based setups are surely advanced in capabilities for them. But, only if you know what garden to enter. I'm a fan of scratch. The kids have gotten hilariously lost when the browser is accidentally closed. Granted, I got lost some on the computers in the header school lab. Power cycling worked rather well to get me back to interpreter.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

yibg 5y ago

Yea looking back I think the barrier is so much lower today. I started programming in basic as well. While it was fun and fairly easy to get started, pretty quickly I hit a wall. After doing some basic things I ran out of ideas on what to build next and there weren't many resources to guide me. There weren't any online tutorials or online courses to help you to keep moving. So pretty soon I gave up on it and didn't come back to it until well into college.

psyc 5y ago

After several years of BASIC, I saved up and bought Watcom C++. At IIRC $600 (1995 dollars), it was literally the single largest purchase I’d ever made to date. As it turned out, I made a zillion-fold return on that particular investment, at least. The first thing I did with it was port one of my simple 3D graphics demos from BASIC to C. My god the feeling of disbelief and raw power when it ran at like 1000 FPS.

bin_bash 5y ago

This is Fading Affect Bias in action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fading_affect_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fading_affect_bias

tluyben2 5y ago

Yes, but I was selling games and 'business software' (for stamp collectors, book shops, schools; all of them were databases written from scratch for that exact goal) written in a mix of basic and asm for most of the 80s and I needed nothing but 1 book and my MSX (both I still own and the msx still works). This is at least half a decade with 1 book and 1 computer making money with software. No internet and, for a large part, no BBSs either (for me).