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> is it possible to learn programming from scratch in 2024 without a credit card? Back when I started, few years before Xbox, I paid a friends dad to build me

> is it possible to learn programming from scratch in 2024 without a credit card? Back when I started, few years before Xbox, I paid a friends dad to build me a PC. It was a few hundred bucks back then and he took cash but it was a significant sum for me even as a working teen. But even that was cheaper than it had been in the early nineties and prior. If I was a cash strapped kid again in the current world I think it would be pretty easy to come up with enough to buy a raspberry pi and load Linux just as you did. If not, you could get a base level laptop for $300 or less at a retail store. You could probably use the TV you already have as a display and likely same for any SD cards for storage space. They probably already have a device they could run a virtual machine on and get started that way (No investment needed.) In any case, probably easier and cheaper than ever to do this as a kid. Question is, is this really the part a kid would find interesting these days? I like programming building things and even lead to me owning a web hosting company in 2000-2003ish. Since then, I still like to program and build things but do not give much care to management of servers, I’ll gladly pay someone else for that.

jareklupinski 2y ago
> is this really the part a kid would find interesting these days? i built the xbox server because i wanted to share my mp3 library with all my friends, and play it on school computers, like spotify's web player, but i didnt track who logged in and what was played how many times (used PHP to build listings, and Flash to actually play the files on the client) putting up a server using my available budget was an important step :) it was only up for a few weeks before it became infected and i had to take it down though... but while showing it to someone more savvy (and connected), they gave me an account on their shared server and i started more projects there

jareklupinski 2y ago

> is this really the part a kid would find interesting these days? i built the xbox server because i wanted to share my mp3 library with all my friends, and play it on school computers, like spotify's web player, but i didnt track who logged in and what was played how many times (used PHP to build listings, and Flash to actually play the files on the client) putting up a server using my available budget was an important step :) it was only up for a few weeks before it became infected and i had to take it down though... but while showing it to someone more savvy (and connected), they gave me an account on their shared server and i started more projects there