3 ms·

It is more than obvious if you look at the broad picture: computers on the 80s were sold to a few million people, most of them with, at least, high school degre

• DerekL 4y ago
  But even then, most of the time computers were used to run programs written by others, such as spreadsheets, word processors, and games. (Though a spreadsheet can be thought of as a specialized type of program.)
• masklinn 4y ago
  An other component is that computers in the 80s largely did not have the power to hide their workings from users. In fact the cheaper ones required basic knowledge of operations in order to just use otherwise they were glorified heaters.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• zamnos 4y ago
  The other thing about computers in the 80's is that Internet access back then was a rarity. So the question, as asked (and answered by most of the comments), includes an implicity purity test - that only on-device programming is "real" programming and that programming on the Internet "doesn't count" for some reason. Yet between glitch.com, jsfiddle, etc, there's a whole slew of accessible programming environments available. I can low-code up some Zapier zaps and a Stripe checkout page, which is enough to get an MVP if you've found your niche customers. Yeah, it's a different world than on-device compilers on back in the 80's but we're not programming in the 80's any more either. Hell, Stack Overflow didn't come about until 2008. Try telling people you learned to program before Stack Overflow (and Google, for that matter).