> Most kids never even knew what BASIC was

Yet magazines and books commonly published program listings for games in BASIC which many kids somehow managed to type in and run.

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tptacek 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yeah, I did that too. That's what you did with these machines. Deeply unsatisfying! Like: a real lesson in how gnarly real computers actually were. This is my point. You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything, but it turns out "anything" took on values ranging from "hours to many hours of typing in BASIC listings and then working through inscrutable errors until something showed up on the screen but then crashed". Computers sucked ass!

Until like a year ago.

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musicale 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Figuring out inscrutable errors seems highly educational. I guess I don't have enough data to determine whether your bad experience was more or less common (probably less common on HN though). I imagine some (like yourself at 8) found computers frustrating and bad, while others (some peer posters on HN, who might also have started a bit older) found them frustrating and good!

	▲	tptacek 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I did come to appreciate that. I was a professional C programmer for a lot of years! A hand tool woodworker, so to speak. It's great. But it's not the same as what I had thought computers were when I was a little kid.

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qsera 8 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

>You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything..

Why did you think that? Did you see people use it like that? anything? really?

For me, computers became intriguing after I started programming in BASIC. Not before that. Before that I was just curious about what the big deal about these things are...

In the literature, there would be passages that describe how computer followed "instructions", but I never could make sense of that or understood what an "instruction" was. So it didn't really sway me either way...

May be your falling the same way for LLMs now..

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tptacek 7 minutes ago | parent [-]

I don't know probably because I was eight years old.

	▲	musicale 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Good point - smart 10 or 11 year olds can do anything, but at 8, especially on your own, it is going to be a lot harder.