Hacker News Reader

Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

We really need to find a way to restore the "home computer": You turn it on, there is a BASIC prompt.

(Of course we can't restore it 1:1, but that quality is so valuable)

UPDATE: I was probably a bit, er, terse. I am really about restoring that quality, and yes, the world has moved on and is in many ways better, so we absolutely cannot "go back", and yes, it is absolutely not a trivial problem. In fact, I'd say it is very, very hard. But so worthwhile.

Components are: open source; languages, particularly for UI programming that make "open source" meaningful (giving people the ability to tinker); development/customization interfaces on devices (shame on you, Apple...and almost everyone else), languages and libraries/frameworks that collapse our incredible complexity stack for the many simple things we want to do, etc.

View on HN

I don't think we can go back. It's like cars. The first cars were sold with the understanding that they needed a lot of maintenance by the buyers. Naturally car drivers got to understand their cars because it was necessary. Now you can drive a car without having a clue how it works. Same with computers. In the 80s it was assumed that would fiddle with your computer all the time. Now you can get a device and just use it.

I have problem with understanding the mindset of people that don't want to learn how the car work or how the computer work. But that is probably because for me it is easier to understand how something mechanical or electric work than to understand how people work..

Many people don't buy cars to understand how they work, they buy cars to go from point A to point B. Computers are much more useful to people than they were 30 years ago, so people don't buy computers to use a computer, they buy computers to accomplish a task.

If you bought a car in 1950 or a computer in 1980 you HAD to understand it if you wanted or not. That was a downside for many people but had the upside of bringing up people who knew how things work.

Most people don't care about learning how things work. Otherwise we'd all be engineers. And even among engineers there are only a few people who want to understand how things work.

There is something, likely many things, in your life that you don't understand the details of, something that an expert in that subject may chastise you for not knowing. Something that you take for granted that it just works, and never stop to think about the logistics.

And that's fine. You have your specialty, they have theirs. And when you need help with it, you don't need to be an expert in the subject because you can hire one for a short period of time.

I'll be honest, I don't know how my furnace works. It just does. And when it doesn't, I call an expert to fix it. Because that's gas and fire and a whole lot of pipes and there's an air conditioner somewhere in the mix and I think that's a humidifier attached? Doesn't matter, I have more important things to think about and I don't want to break it even more (or worse, blow up my house). I'll let the expert handle it.

Sure there are lots of stuff I don't know, but I do want to learn at least the basics about them. Not even saying I think it is something wrong with people that don't think like that, only that they in that way are different. Different is good and is what bring progress. I hire people for doing stuff like electricity and doing service on my daily driver, not because I don't know how to do it but so I can use my time on other things. But to me going out to the garage and work on an old car is therapy, it is relaxing and take my mind off everything else

I understand perfectly well how my car works. I know I could change the oil if I wanted to, yet I also know that I have never and will never do so, because it's messy, time-consuming the first couple of times, and you still have to dispose of the old oil anyway.

That mindset, my mindset, is completely alien to people of my parents generation. I think it's the same thing for hobby programming in my generation.

> Now you can drive a car without having a clue how it works. Same with computers.

Here's a qbasic program to draw a line on the screen.

    10 SCREEN 13
    20 LINE (X1, Y1) - (X2, Y2), COLOUR

What's the equivalent in a modern language?

  1. Open Paint (or other options).
  2. Click line icon on toolbar.
  3. Click canvas, hold down click.
  4. Move mouse.
  5. Release click.

Don't need a language to do it. Don't even need a keyboard to do it.

We've pretty much got it in the Raspberry Pi. Having a distro that boots straight to a python REPL is not a significant challenge at all.

I mean, you can do the same on any computer, but SBCs seem to make people approach them differently. By not looking at all like a PC, people simply forget to treat them like a PC. And it's fantastic.

I don't think this actually solves the problem though. The problem is that there's no magic anymore. It's just normal. I know children who aren't quite walking yet, can't quite form the word "banana", but can operate an iPad comfortably enough. They will never, ever, approach a computer with the sense of wonder that I did my Atari.

Computing is simply so universal that today's children approach it with the same awe and wonder as you would electric lights or running water. That doesn't mean we'll have no plumbers, electricians, no-one will be fascinated by electronics, etc. But it does mean that it'll never be the same as the 80s.

> Computing is simply so universal that today's children

> approach it with the same awe and wonder as you would

> electric lights or running water.

I think a better analog would (should?) be paper and writing, a medium not a tool (see Alan Kay). Just because pen and paper are ubiquitous and seem unremarkable (they are not, they are extremely remarkable and refined information processing/storage technologies!), doesn't mean they can't get used to create. And of course computers are used that way by a lot of people, but only in simulating old media. So in many ways "computing" is not universal. Tools built by computing and often simulating other tools are.

Of course those ROM BASIC interpreters tended to be very minimal implementations. It almost always made more sense to boot up DOS and run GWBASIC instead.

I remember getting the full Hypercard development stack with the Mac LC my parents bought when I was a kid. It just came with System 7, and given that there was no Stack Exchange or anybody around to ask I had to figure it out by reading other stacks. There aren't many languages you can learn with virtually no other programming experience from just reading the source, but Hypertalk had lots of syntactic sugar to help the young reader.

For anybody who has not seen it, Hypertalk code looked like:

  ask "What is your name?"
  
  put it into card field "yourName"

The language came with the UI builder built in, so making a button was as simple as dragging it onto the stack, then opening it up to write the callback directly into the object.

When you opened the button, you would see the text editor with:

  on mouseUp

  end mouseUp

already populated

Nowadays, you turn it on and you get access to most of the collective knowledge of the world, can connect with anyone, that kinda thing. Computers and devices are several orders of magnitude more capable in various dimensions than they were back then, and IMO "kids these days" get to use it to get access to a LOT more possible areas of employment than they did back in the BASIC era. I mean what could you do with a computer back then besides basic text entry, some simple games, and programming? The last part was for some people - the privileged few that actually had access to a computer - the most exciting part.

In the early 80s the computer was thought of and perceived by almost everyone as a tool to be used to achieve some further end. Today if people think of computers at all (given the ubiquity of embedded computing) it is as a means of consuming content or a communication channel.

I'm not sure there's a real path to "restore" that original mindset for the vast majority of people now.

Well back then, they had games which were consumption, and honestly, mostly what I use a computer for. I also programmed. I think the missing ingredient is showing off (as implied in an earlier post). In other words, when we wrote something, we would show it off to other people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com