Young me remembers fondly poking and peeking system memory locations to see what happens. The manual, if I remember right, had a table of memory locations to system settings. Things like font and background colors.

I made a “punch out like” boxing game in basic where the background color blocks was the opponent and the font lines was your character via poking memory locations.

It was slow but I was just a kid at the time. It definitely told me what I wanted to do for a living at an early age.

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lance_ewing 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Exactly the same story with me. I got my VIC 20 when I was about 10, in the mid 80s, and that is how I learnt how to program and how I knew what I wanted to do as a career.

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technothrasher 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Add me to that list, though my Commodore machine was a PET 2000. In fact, I was young enough at first that all I could do was remove lines from other people's basic programs and see what happened. It all grew from there.

	▲	lance_ewing 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I probably started the same way. I remember spending forever typing in BASIC games from magazines and books from the local library. They never worked straight off, so a bit of "debugging" was usually required, i.e. spot the typos.

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mixmastamyk 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interesting, did similar. But there was no information available to me about working on them for a living in the early 80s. Only the movie Wargames, which while cool didn’t seem like a realistic path, nor did it pay. Didn’t figure it out until a full decade later.

	▲	lance_ewing 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe at 10 years old, I wasn't thinking much about working, but the VIC 20 started me on the programming path, with an IBM PC being our next home computer a few years later.

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Eggpants 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Definitely helped that I just missed the punch card era. I know young me would have dropped my stack of cards many times…