The lack of experience in a child can lead to some funny situations. I want to say this happened in first grade or so, had a teacher, Mr Macintosh, who had several of his own Mac computers available in his classroom, and Kid Pix was loaded up on them (amongst other classics of the time). I was obsessed, particularly with the Bomb, thought it was just the coolest way to clear the screen, this ostensibly serious concept of a program made fun.

I also had difficulty connecting with my classmates, combination of untreated ADHD, and issues at home. For some reason I got it into my head that the bomb was cool, so if I told the others I had a bomb in my backpack I'd be cool! This was very shortly after the Columbine massacre, and of course the policy at that moment was to immediately call in the police. They talked with me, impressed upon my young mind the seriousness of such claims, and we all thankfully just moved on.

Odd to think back on now.

Kid Pix was the very first program I ever used on a computer when I was around 5 years old. Good times. Still remember the dynamite.

FYI there is an iOS port of KidPix that my kids throughly enjoy as much as I enjoyed playing it at that age.

I set up an old Mac Mini G4 with a patched version of Mac OS 9 with the sole purpose of allowing my 3 year old son to play point and click games, Kid Pix being one of them.

Oh man, what a throw back. The bomb to clear the screen was something else. In later versions they had a slideshow thingy, similar to hypercard.

Essay is from 2013, been shared on HN before but not much discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fred-green-blue.com%2F...

The UI really was easy to use like the article says. Part of this was there were so many fun options that we put extra effort into understanding the menus.

This (along with Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego) were the things to use at my school.

I had no idea we had basically the first commercial version but the timing lines up.

As an adult I now feel for those teachers who had to hear a whole bunch of computers making constant sound effects though.

I’m sure we had kid pix studio for windows, may have come bundled with something like a graphics card. Definitely unusual, although I don’t remember my kids engaging with it as there were a lot of other kid oriented programs when the whole multimedia PC was in vogue. Hard to compete with Reader Rabbit. Great story though.

What a paradigm shift it was when us kids in the computer lab found out you can change the stamp size/stop the animations with shift, command, opt etc

Perfect reminder to play a little kid pix to get my mind right.

We can bring Kid Pix with the bomb back. Someone Show HN tomorrow Kid Pix ported to wasm

the picture galleries on that site are great, I wish I had chronicled things that way.

Yet another reminder to begin with the thing that sparks joy, and go from there. Thanks for posting. His photography in the deep archive section is great.

"Oh no!"