A Commodore hacker’s story
ugur.ozyilmazel.com
ugur.ozyilmazel.com
Maybe having the machine just switch on to BASIC alone was enough to get people involved.
I remember telling my mom to upgrade to a iPad, and she asked what the difference was. She didn't really understand the benefits. The PC also had a browser, it also had netflix etc.
Finally, I told her there wasn't this long power up time. You just switch it on and it is right there, and it sort of clicked.
Once she got it, there was no going back.
That initial power on state -- to a graphical interface, to BASIC -- is just so compelling.
Up until this beauty reared it's head [0] I'd probably go months between reboots of my MBP. Protip: It doesn't happen any more since I stopped leaving Safari running in the background.
Maybe on my macbook pro but that's far from a universal experience. Even my iPhone takes longer than that ...
A stark contrast to today, where we are presented a menu of "apps" but no obvious way to program the device (and in the case of some common devices, no way at all). People think that kids these days "know tech" because they spend a lot of time in front of "screens" but imho that's not the case... we may have gone a step backwards in terms of tech savviness since the Commodore generation.
Reminds me of this recent conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228740
Personally, while I think the power on to BASIC definitely was compelling at the time, and it lead to many years of hacking fun for me too in the 80s, I don’t think it can work anymore. It wasn’t just having BASIC, it was having BASIC and also having nothing else to do, except maybe a couple of crappy games that were either too hard or too boring after a few minutes. Today, there’s a vast ocean of amazing choice, and kids don’t have the patience for something like a BASIC terminal. I’ve tried and tried with my kids, and they can’t bring themselves to choose programming or playing in a text shell, even though they’re super interested in the ideas and want to learn to make games.
wrt your kids, programming just isn't for everybody [0]
[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-f...
The paper that article was based on has been retracted. That should make you at least think twice about claiming it's true.
It's also studying college undergrads, not children.
And it's from 2006, before the iPhone. I honestly don't think it's very relevant to the issue I was referring to.
In any case, my kids are both interested in programming and able to do it. They just choose not to, most of the time, because there is a flood of more entertaining and very well designed choices. We didn't have anything like this level of choice when I was a kid. BASIC was it, that's the beauty of it. The environment was so limited, you had no choice but learn to program.
At work, we're seeing patterns in hiring as well. Older applicants have all been programming since early teens, while the vast majority of new college grads today started programming in college. It definitely feels like programming is starting later in life, even though general computer literacy is starting earlier and is much more widespread.
you should not be so quick to dismiss an article you haven't read
> They just choose not to
That's exactly my point. It's not just about aptitude, it's about being interested. In my experience this is the key factor that separates good engineers from great ones: The ability to just sit down and "do it".
> the vast majority of new college grads today started programming in college.
This has always been the case.
Computer Literacy is not the same as being a good programmer, the same way as being able to read is not the same as being a good writer.
1. VHS
2. Cable TV
And the second one, in particular, had a similar feel to it (for the time). It induced this endless grazing behavior where you kept switching between channels hoping for the next best show. And those advertisements meant you would start grazing again every 15 min.
I am sure cable destroyed many budding talents, but it somehow wasn't enough to extinguish everyone who saw that blinking cursor.
It's always funny on C64, because its version of BASIC is terrible: two character variable names, no direct support for sound or graphics. Atari 800 BASIC on the other hand, was awesome, except for the bugs and slowness (all numbers were floats).
"The ROM resident BASIC 3.5, however, is more powerful than the VIC-20's and C64's BASIC 2.0, in that it has commands for sound and bitmapped graphics (320×200 pixels), as well as simple program tracing/debugging."
I'm actually too young for the C64 but we didn't have much money so my big brother left it for me when he moved out.
So when my friends had SNES I had C64, when they had Playstation I had SNES, and so on until I started making my own money in IT.
Anyways, I still have all my old tapes left from those days. All TURBO 250, all pirated.
I'll mention it: Turbo 250D by Mr. Z of TRIAD!
(The "D" version implemented <-D or DSAVE, which could save a large file back to a floppy disk from tape.)
Bypassing, disabling, removing a copy protection or extracting the data from a protected medium is cracking, the metaphor being that the protection cracked as glass would have. Those had to work perfectly, and they were often bug fixed, trained and level-packed as well as single-sided, thus making them better, faster and smaller than the original. That's not a hack.
That's one definition of a hack. The word famously has many different meanings depending on context. http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html
It's what people here do a lot as opposed to system engineering.
And then came the Amiga (after Commodore64, but before Suns). If the atmosphere was phenomenal before, the joy now became stratospheric with what we could do on that machine. Sun systems were of course on a whole new plane of existence compared to the Amiga we knew and loved.
Lots of cracked C64 games were unplayable to me because I didn't know about some kind of exotic move joystick left right while keeping fire button depressed movement to be executed at just the right place.