Hacker News Reader

Comment by j45 | Hacker News Reader

Remarkable that he has business sense too, that FunPass is totally a great deal and irresistible.

I can't wait to be in LA in a few weeks to visit him. Everyone who's in LA ever should make a point to tell this kid never to let go of his creativity and aspirations.

In 2nd grade I built a computer out of a tide box, complete with paper tower rolls that scrolled a long sheet of perforated paper that was a game. Everyone looked at me weird, but I had my first computer, and more importantly, could explore imagining how the computer would work to do everything.

Make me wonder where the heck most of us have ended up from the passion we all had as kids and if we've stayed true.

View on HN

Haha, the paper towel and Tide box computer brings back memories. My cousins and I made side-scrolling video game machines this way.

We set up the paper towel rolls in the box, with paper (half-sheets of copy paper taped together end to end) rolled around them, with a big, long scene/level drawn on it. One person would turn the crank, causing the screen to scroll while the player controlled a character which could move up and down, courtesy of being attached to a popsicle stick poking out a slot on the side of the box. The object of the game was to hit goals and jump over objects and pits.

More complex games had two popsicle-stick controlled sprites, and I seem to remember that we experimented with cannibalizing the motor out of a broken remote control car to run the screen, at one point.

have you seen the teagueduino mario brothers scroller: http://vimeo.com/28781718 ?

Ha! I hadn't seen that, thanks. That's cool. Definitely more refined than our cereal box machines. :)

Around that same age (9-10) my parents enrolled me in a program called FutureKids which held computer classes for young children (we played educational games more than learning about computer architecture, but still).

I went for an hour every Thursday for many months, and loved every minute of it. So much so that I built a computer out of legos and gave it to the instructor -- it included a chassis, a motherboard, ISA cards, CPU, memory.

Dont just tell this kid, tell all kids never to let go of their creativity and aspirations!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com