You-can-program-too encouragement in early home-computer ads

Oh, those program listings in computing magazines - I remember that! But it wasn't just magazines, you could buy books with programs listed in them. I don't know how many books I had at home with listings for games in them. As I had a computer that wasn't a big hit like the Apple (I had a Compucolor 2), it was the only way I had of getting new games onto my computer. The books used to come with listings for games that would cover 2-5 pages, with different variations for different computers. So, for example, there would be a listing for the Apple ][, a listing for the ZX81, a listing for the C64, and so on. Looking at those listings and figuring out what I needed to change to make the game work on my system was a big aid for learning to program - at least it was for me.

I also remember one book that had just one game in it, a text adventure game. It was called Haunted House, or something like that. Anyway, the book explained in loving detail how everything functioned, and suggested modifications that you could try to develop on your own. I think that book all by itself probably did more for teaching me... I was going to say how to program, but it wasn't exactly that, it was more how to think like a computer, because frankly the coding style of that book was dreadful. But it did help me grok arrays and variables and strings and parsing and all that good stuff.

These days it is just so much harder for kids to get into computers. For starters, I was able to write games (or at least type in the program for games) that weren't too far removed from the quality of commercial games. That just isn't true in today's world. And of course, as has been mentioned about 50 million times on HN, it is much harder to get to a programming environment on today's computers. Back then the computer booted into a BASIC interpreter, but there is no modern system that does something similar.

Anyway, that link certainly brought back some good memories!

I was about 12 and had learned some BASIC from copying programs from magazines when my dad got a Pascal ROM. I just couldn't understand how a program could work without line numbers!

Computers were really an invitation to learn programming because they booted instantly and you could try out commands even without actually writing a program. And there wasn't much more you could do: there were no browsers and messengers and other things to take your attention. It's hard for a 12 year old to take up programming on today's machines.

It seems the personal computer democratisation really started with graphical interfaces. Casual users don't have time to learn how to use command line, let alone programming.