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What's to keep you from picking up a an Apple IIc on eBay?

I think buying an Apple ][ missed the point. I think misterman0 meant to say is not the specific issue of teaching his own children to write programs, but accessibility to programming in general (I invited my brother to play a text based adventure game [...] He was eight. I was still ten.), and how the low accessibility has buried many potentially talented children from exploring it by themselves (I have two kids now. 9 and 12. They are brighter than me. [...] My son started his YT channel at the age of 8. Mostly in game footage. He uses down pretty cool sw to edit his clips.).

I was one of those kids with an Apple ][ and in fact I still own it. I thought about setting it up for my own kids (now 16 and 18) years ago to tinker with. But I realized that it wasn’t due to accessibility that they aren’t interested in programming. Times change and my things aren’t their things. If they wanted to program, there’s a lot of modern and accessible environments to start with. They had plenty of friends doing things like LEGO mindstorms or finding other ways to program. I realized they were no more interested in programming than learning how to change a spark plug when I tried to show them that. And it wasn’t because computing (like many other things) has become more complex.

I’m not really even sure computing is less accessible now. Kids find a way.

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