5 ms·

let's not overly romanticise it though the vast majority of people with access to computers in the 80s didn't harness the opportunity to be able to understand

• jmmv 4y ago
  Most definitely did not, but for those that put some interest, it seems like it was much easier than these days.
• actually_a_dog 4y ago
  Agreed. I'd guess that for every hobbyist programmer, there were probably at least 10 people who just wanted to play Ultima or something.
  • kgwxd 4y ago
    I was literally the person that just wanted to play Ultima (Underworld). But when things didn't work because the sound card didn't have the right jumper settings, or there wasn't enough free ram, or I just didn't understand how to start the game up in the most optimized way, I had to figure that stuff out, without the internet. Ultima jump started my IT career.
• melling 4y ago
  Yeah, sort of the same today. The C64 was incredible but I thought skipping Basic and going straight to 6510 assembler was the way to go. Got all those extra sprites by interrupting the scan lines, the huge performance advantage, etc More than once I wiped my source code while zeroing memory. I enjoyed Byte magazine but Compute! was my favorite: https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-gallery/compute-magazines-issue-44-through-90/amp/ https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-gallery/compute-magazines... In my opinion, it’s even more exciting learning machine learning today than 6510 assembler on the C64. I’d skip early the 1980’s nostalgia and begin the next quest. Kaggle is a good place to start: https://www.kaggle.com/mmellinger66 https://www.kaggle.com/mmellinger66 And this book: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hands-on-machine-learning/9781492032632/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hands-on-machine-learni...
  • eru 4y ago
    I always wonder what could have been, if the Commodore 64 and similar machines would have come with Forth instead of Basic.
    • rwmj 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace I think the answer is: They wouldn't have sold very many :-(
      • pipo234 4y ago
        I bought one of these 2nd hand in early nineties after being introduced to the RPN way of doing things with a Hewlett Packard 28S calculator. Had fun with this machine although it was similar in many respects to ZX81 (and supposedly Spectrum) I grew up with. The soft- and hardware had similar issues. For a meaningful programs in both cases you would quickly need to descend to machine code, which on both systems was very enjoyable experience. (E.g. BBC micro had far more mature software stack.) But you are probably right in implying that Forth probably was too alien to ever gain mass adoption, even if the soft and hardware would have been superior to more common BASIC alternative.
    • muyuu 4y ago
      the C64 didn't ship with it, but there were Forth systems available, notably "64 Forth" which was a superset of Fig-Forth
• exitb 4y ago
  I don’t think that growing up with a c64 made kids into great programmers, but it did ingrain the notion that a computer is a programmable machine at its core. That complex things are just collections of simpler things. It’s very hard to have the same realization growing up with current technology. It just too easy to see computer(/phone/tablet) as a complete appliance, which operation you never really alter. The same way you don’t mess with your washing machine outside of its designed functions.
• tragomaskhalos 4y ago
  It's true that most kids used their computers just to play games (plus ça change ..). However for me as one of those kids who did love programming my ZX Spectrum as well as the odd game, there were a couple of fun crossovers: - Working out the 'infinite lives' Poke for a game; this typically involved loading the game's machine code, searching for the 'dec a' and 'dec (hl)' instructions and poking a 'nop' into each location in turn and trying the game. This crude approach was surprisingly effective - When the microdrive (a fast tape device) came out, getting your games stored in that. This was a challenge as the 'drive required extra ram but there was none spare if the game was 48k. I worked out an elegant hack that involved multiple loads of the game into different areas of memory, including one that wrapped around the top of memory, 'wrote' most of the remainder into ROM and then the last few K into the screen buffer, which is how you got the extra space needed. Then a short routine to reorder everything tacked on :)
• ghaff 4y ago
  I'd add that right around 1983 is sort of a special date. It was just around that time that it was becoming reasonable for a middle-class person to buy a home computer. Go back a few years from that time and you could potentially program in Basic or Fortran but you were doing so over a terminal or with punch cards and didn't really have any direct interaction with the computer except in relatively specialized situations.
  • themadturk 4y ago
    1983 was when I got my first computer, a Timex/Sinclair 1000, followed up about a year later by a Commodore 64. Unlike many who had their first computing experiences then, I was already an adult, married and almost 30 years old. My experience and enthusiasm for small computers led directly to the IT career I started in 1989.
• benj111 4y ago
  Isn't it more a case of X% will become programmers if given the opportunity. Computers of old maximised that opportunity thus increasing the absolute number of programmers.
  • muyuu 4y ago
    there is truth to that, but mainly in a social sense - the best that was out there in practical and economic terms for most people, also was a very good learning platform but in terms of just existing, nowadays there is better; you can even just go back and use those old machines in more accessible ways than back then, and for free, too... whereas back then it was a middle class kid thing