Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

I still have the Acorn Atom that I started learning to code on. 12Kb of memory (with the expansion pack installed). No hard drive - if you don't spend 10 minutes saving it to cassette then it's gone. As I found out when my cousin turned off my computer after I'd rushed to dinner after an 8 hour coding session :( still haven't forgiven him.

My girlfriend is trying to learn to code, and I realised that I had it easy - because computers were much simpler, learning to code on them was much simpler. I learned Assembly coding trying to speed up my simple homemade games, but that was easy: the machine only had 3 registers, the entire machine memory was addressable, and there was maybe two dozen commands to learn.

I think this is why I like Go so much. It reminds me of old-school BASIC in its simplicity.

I still keep typing `IF <condition> THEN` and `FOR I = 1 TO 10` if I'm tired, even after all these years.

There's a nice little app called PICO-8 that retains that simplicity, I heartily recommend it for anyone who wants to learn programming (and I don't in any way get paid for saying this). Also that syntax is almost valid Lua which PICO-8 uses.

There are a number of fantasy computers around now. I have played around with Pico-8 and TIC-80 [1] so far. Very much fun. The TIC-80 is opensource and can be found compiled for most stuff, even the Pandora handheld console for those that managed to get hold of one. Hopefully someone makes a port for the new DragonBox Pyra [2] when that one is out, that would be really cool :-)

[1] https://tic.computer/

[2] https://www.dragonbox.de/en/45-pyra

I'm not sure we can turn the clock back like that. Back in the early 80's computers were expected to do very little, so we were easily impressed if they did anything. For those of us who were easily impressed with this, it got us interested. And it was possible to bang out a somewhat-playable version of an arcade game in 12Kb ;)

Nowadays the expectations are so much bigger. I've seen people create their first website and be disappointed it looks so crappy, rather than excited it works at all. Not everyone, mind - some are still excited.

I can tell you from experience, PICO-8 has enthralled all my children, especially my oldest, with how little is required to make a really cool game like Jelpi. Every time we realize yet another cool thing you can do with just cos, sin, and atan2, we're always floored. Maybe we're simpler people, but my children were aware of modern video games and web apps, and somehow they still are fascinated by it and the oldest one has mastered it by now.

That's really cool :)

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