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My son dabbled with Scratch for a while, where you can conjure up multiple large full color sprites with minimal effort, even animate them, but pretty quickly l

My son dabbled with Scratch for a while, where you can conjure up multiple large full color sprites with minimal effort, even animate them, but pretty quickly lost interest in programming altogether. Whereas when I entered "SET(1,1)" on a TRS80 model-I and got a single white pixel on the screen? That was some Magic, let me tell you. Maybe the difference is that today it's harder to get the feedback between I-typed-this and that-happened, when there's already a whole lot of that happening all over the screen. For a kid in 1980, there was a definite dopamine hit to be had from discovering the trail to High Technology, right there at your command. You could make Pong! Or Space Invaders! The possibilities were endless.

lll-o-lll 4y ago
I think the real difference is that the excitement came from the technology being brand new. In the 80s this was the future. The future has been around a long time now, and that turns it into the past. Oldies such as us are quite into the past, but kids not so much. The generation before us, it was all electronics and radios. Kids today want to make the kind of games they play. Except that’s not really possible of course. Roblox, youtube, that’s the kind of thing they can actually do _and_ is the future as they see it. Poor kids. Robotics is the edge I’m trying to push; better than that other crap at least.