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Comment by 52-6F-62 | Hacker News Reader

Far better than I could do at that age!

I think the furthest I was getting at that time was building out really terrible looking web pages in Notepad and making awful little animations in BASIC and Turing (learning lang).

Keep it up!

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I made a colourful ASCII birthday cake in Pascal that beeped happy birthday at that age. Still one of my proudest programming moments.

writeln(chr(7)) ?

or something more (e.g. playing different frequencies to sound like the happy birthday song)?

Related, and good fun for kids of all ages (first did something like this on my earliest home computer [1]):

Play the piano on your computer with Python:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/04/play-piano-on-your-compu...

[1] Lissajous hippo, retrocomputing and the IBM PC Jr.:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2012/09/lissajous-hippo.html

Western classic music fans may find the comments on that post interesting - stuff about octaves and frequencies.

I was on my Atari 800XL making games at that age. I started hitting problems that I thought should be easy. Like, I wanted to draw circles. But the library was just pixels and lines ( when I got to assembly programming, suddenly lines became a problem too ). There was no googling the answers, but luckily I could go "Daaaad..", who was a physicist, and he happily introduced me to trig and I eventually learned to draw circles....slow drawing circles, but still, circles.

+1. Reading your answer made me think you were talking about me. Except I had a TI99/4A, and "Daaaad" was my real google. My circles were probably slower and more pixelated

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