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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking about it the other day. We got a C64 Maxi (a full-sized C64 emulator) and my 8yo daughter loves some of the C64 games and was exploring a little bit the BASIC environment and realizing she can make a machine do her bidding by telling it what to do. I feel that screen time on it is far less worrying than on YouTube or Roblox.

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Similar thing here. I even got a real C64C with games on floppies. My young daughter loves Giana Sisters, like me back in the days. Now a got another one. But with the fire button on port II defective. I repaired it on my own by replacing the according chip. What a great feeling. And the living retro scene is helping a lot! C64 forever!

The 1541 was "vintage" even before it was released :)

Do they have corresponding books where you can type in the programs, building it progressively?

You can find tons of magazines from the 70's and 80's with programs at the archive.org website.

Steve Woz in his biography talks about the uniqueness of his era, where you could know every single aspect of the machine you were working on — and how that let you squeeze every last drop out of it, often through really creative ways.

Thats still quite possible. Buy yourself an arduino board and the chip manual and you can know just about everything about it. Some slightly more sophisticated boards can even do video output and run modern programming languages while still not having an OS or complex firmware.

If anything its even easier now because its dirt cheap and there are hundreds of hours of tutorials available for free. And the arduino tools have removed a lot of the pointless complexity like telling your compiler what clock speed and revision your chip is.

> Buy yourself an arduino board and

Not quite. You are programming the Arduino, but you are using a vastly more complicated computer to do it. There is a lot of beauty in the simplicity of having a machine simpler than an Arduino and be able to, using nothing but it, get an interesting result.

I'm not sure it matters really other than nostalgia value. Its doubtfully more educational. And in any case, there are hobby kits where you can build a basic computer and program itself using the computer. Its all still around, only cheaper and more available. Its just not the _only_ option we have now.

I thought Roblox was a Minecraft-like with building aspects to it?

It's an open game similar in some ways to Minecraft, but the amount of pre-canned games means it's more likely for a kid to lazily consume rather than work towards creating. (In a way that's slightly worse than Minecraft, IMO.)

Its hard to explain, but minecraft is more like an oliver postgate program like Bagpuss or the Clangers compared to one of the newer kids animated TV shows were stuff is exploding all the time.

It does. While it is more powerful than Minecraft's creation side (and your child programming in Lua has an entrepreneurial motivation for Roblox bucks which translates to real dollars), the downside is that it feels more separate from Minecraft's creative side, which is baked into the gameplay itself

Minecraft is a single game with the option of mods. Roblox is like a game marketplace with an engine where kids can make their own stuff and play each other's stuff (also microtransactions and the option for the kids to make money from said microtransactions).

Roblox games tend to be stuffed full of microtransactions, which is really annoying as a parent because kids eat that stuff up.

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