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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

What was transformative for me in my youth were the "listings" he mentions. I remember spending hours typing in pages of code, having it fail, and having to debug it. Even though I didn't think so when I was 12, I think these days that those failures were the best thing that ever happened to me. I actually think they were far more valuable than the AP CS course I took as a senior in HS.

That experience taught me skills that I still use today. Mainly, trying to understand an unfamiliar (often poorly commented) codebase, and having to debug it.

These days, I think that the most equivalent experience might be working on something open source. But I'm afraid the motivation just isn't there for most kids. My motivation was "Wow! Free GAMES!", but my kid gets free games on his tablet without having to debug a darned thing.

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Motivations are certainly different now. I do wonder if kids today still have that "wild west" feel when messing with computers. I remember when I was young, writing programs and making computers do simple things seemed really impressive to me at the time! The bar is a lot higher now and I wonder if that dissuades some kids from trying because doing something impressive now requires a lot of extra overhead that I didn't have to deal with.

> I remember when I was young, writing programs and making computers do simple things seemed really impressive to me at the time!

It was same feeling for me too, in the early/mid 80s. And it was impressive also because few other people were even doing it. Whether other people could or not, based on their capabilities, most didn't actually have any home computer to even practice on. Merely having a home computer in, say, 1983, was a rare thing. Actually being able to make it do things you wanted was even rarer. It probably seemed more impressive to many outsiders than it actually was (in the sense that a for-loop is pretty boring/basic) but hard to separate out that impressiveness between having access to the situation at all vs having the skills.

Me too. Hours and hours of typing...then "RUN". I had a computer for about a year with no tape drive to store anything I typed. My Mom used to do me a favour and shut my computer off...thus losing all my work. Good times.

I learned to program from old books a coworker of my dad’s gave me. Some of my favorites were two books of computer games, where you would type in the code word for word.

Each line would have symbols that told you which versions of basic used that line, so there would be duplicate lines for different versions of basic. They didn’t have the version I had, so I had to figure out the differences on my own.

I learned so much.

I typed in stuff from Compute! magazine. They had a neat helper program to show a simple checksum of each line in the margin, so you could catch typos more easily. To make things even more fun I didn't have a tape drive so I got really good at typing in my games each time I felt like playing :)

Oh wow, I wrote games for Compute! magazine. Rather, ported them. Readers would submit games for their particular computer, an editor would select a few for each issue, and then we'd port them to the other popular 8-bit micros. Best high school job ever.

IIRC the guy who wrote the checksum generator also wrote the common assembly language graphics routines we used for all the games.

That's amazing. The game I had was called "Biker Dave" for Atari 800XL [1] and it was a little biker sprite jumping over obstacles.

[1] This was it: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-biker-dav...

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