Comment by meredithbloom
1 day ago
> "But it booted straight into BASIC. That’s all it did. I was, like, 8 years old. I wasn’t about to learn BASIC. What I learned instead: computers were not as awesome as I’d imagined."
You were the exception. Most kids felt awe. We started learning BASIC and creating "dumb games". That's the origin story of most people my age who ended up in this doomed industry.
I think you were the exception. Most kids never even knew what BASIC was. If there was a game already on the computer, they'd be happy to play it. If they really liked the game they might learn how to start the game if it wasn't already running, but they didn't care about doing anything else. Kids who were into computers looked at a computer and saw endless possibility. Everybody else played sports outside, watched TV, or hung out with their friends.
> Most kids never even knew what BASIC was
Yet magazines and books commonly published program listings for games in BASIC which many kids somehow managed to type in and run.
The kids who loved computers were the ones plugging in line after line of BASIC. Well, them and the ones who just really loved games. Games were a gateway drug for a lot of kids because for so long games could really make you work for it. Games had kids making changes to config.sys and setting BLASTER environment variables, connecting to a BBS or FTP sites for downloads, and troubleshooting network issues to get LAN games running with friends. You could get pretty good at computers just getting your fix. That took a pretty strong commitment though because if all you cared about were games, and if you had them, consoles made gaming very simple. Too simple if you valued the sense of learning and accomplishment that came from winning a wrestling match with an unforgiving computer keeping you from the game you wanted to play.
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I would like to point out that you were playing a bit of goal post moving.
>Most kids felt awe.
then
>which many kids somehow managed to type in and run.
The number of kids that had computers that typed in BASIC programs was absolutely tiny, unless they were doing it as part of a school as a grade. The number of kids at home that had computers in around 93 was less than 1/5th of all households and those tended to be the most wealthy. Even then they were so expensive most parents were telling them to stay away and not letting them edit random files.
Yeah, I did that too. That's what you did with these machines. Deeply unsatisfying! Like: a real lesson in how gnarly real computers actually were. This is my point. You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything, but it turns out "anything" took on values ranging from "hours to many hours of typing in BASIC listings and then working through inscrutable errors until something showed up on the screen but then crashed". Computers sucked ass!
Until like a year ago.
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Probably for quite a while kids were more likely to have a console than access to an actual computer. But if you had a computer it was not like you could rely on having someone else around to start up the game for you. In fact there was a good chance that your access to a computer was arranged by adults who specifically expected you to learn how to use it.
It was probably a function of not just personality type but education. For whatever reason I was taught basic in elementary school as a millennial and it left an impression.
Education has to help demystify computers and give people an idea of what they could do with one. Basic seems like a weird choice for a millennial, but at least it had you actually write code instead of abstracting it away into pushing around icons like some of the systems I've seen for teaching young kids about software or even just giving directions to turtles.
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10 print "hello"
20 goto 10
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In that area, kids with computers that booted straight to basic like the spectrum, bbc micro, c64 etc fell into two camps -- those who were interested, and those whose parents were interested. I suspect the former were more numerous, as to have a parent interested enough to spend a fortune on a computer without the pester power of the kid feels quite niche.
The vast majority of kids never touched computers, other than maybe running logo at school to move a turtle around.
Most kids who were only interested in a game had a NES or Sega console.
Of the former group, the awe began when you wrote in the example program from the manual or magazine, made it do something, and then changed it. Even something as simple as changing from 3 lives to 99.
> I suspect the former were more numerous, as to have a parent interested enough to spend a fortune on a computer without the pester power of the kid feels quite niche.
Having been one of the interested kids (but it took quite a while before any real program design or analysis clicked for me) my experience was that most of the others didn't seem all that interested (and were really just there to play games).
Why would you get a computer in that era if you didn't want to learn BASIC?
You got a computer in that era because you thought you talked to them and they did what you asked them to do.
Then you got the computer and when it started up you got a flashing K. It was a bit of a disappointment. But you flicked open the hefty manual, started reading and before long you were hooked.
One career later, I now have a computer that is very, very close to what I wanted all those years ago but with a significant and irritating genie attitude to granting my wishes.
Now if we can just tone down the genie stuff…
Kids weren’t getting computers, their parents were.
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Because you could get pirated games from the other kids at school. Or at least that seemed like the most popular reason.
To play the games that were included in books and magazines as BASIC program listings that you could type in and play.
Your priors are all out of whack. Most people never learned BASIC, let alone at 8. Programming is much more accessible now than then, but the overwhelming majority of people still don’t know any JavaScript or python or anything else.
Programming (by humans) is less accessible in 2026 because most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment and they don't include a user-friendly programming instruction manual (graphing calculators may be an exception however). And before the era of "there's an app for that" it was assumed that users would need to write their own programs, so systems were designed to support that. Vibe programming (by LLMs) is more accessible now however.
BASIC was designed as a simplified, interactive version of FORTRAN that non-experts could learn in an afternoon, but which was still powerful enough for a wide range of applications including numerical methods, simulations, data processing, and games. It was also small enough to implement effectively on a timeshared minicomputer or an 8-bit microcomputer.
Even though the Mac was GUI-based, for a time it shipped with, and promoted, HyperCard, which led to a brief explosion of user-created programs developed as HyperCard stacks.
Have you ever been diagnosed with ADD or autism? I don't expect you to answer back on that. People that have these characteristics tend to cluster in fields like tech. This means without any prior knowledge you self filtered to a set of actions you didn't know you had a much higher attraction to than a random sample of the population.
In addition this also increases the probability that your unaware of others peoples drives, likes, and abilities, which can easily mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information.
>most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment
Yes, but now everyone and their mum has a personal computing device, and there's tutorials readily accessible, and five seconds of googling can bring you to an online programming environment.
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> Most people never learned BASIC, let alone at 8.
I learned it at age 12. It was pretty much as the author described, except in my case the "computer" was a Texas Instruments teletype, a phone, and a 300 baud modem. Plus a booklet with reddish cover introducing the BASIC language and how to connect to our school account at Washtenaw Computing Services. That was the beginning of a life-long journey with computers.
I’d argue programming is much less accessible now. For starters “programming” means a thousand different things and where do you even start?
My Apple //e came with one language, BASIC, it was built in, nothing to buy, and came with a book on how to get started writing it.
But yeah I didn’t start at 8.
We didn’t get that Apple until I was 10, so that’s then I started.
I had Turbo C as a young teenager, but really learned C at the csh prompt of a terminal connected to a giant DG/UX computer in my first summer job.
I actually still don't know BASIC.
Unix/Linux historically gave gave you a shell prompt (allowing you to type in shell programs) after login and a C compiler in the box. Modern Ubuntu or macOS technically still have terminal apps and shell prompts, but usually boot into a desktop GUI.
> You were the exception.
I was really surprised by the article, I assumed it was going to be the same as my experience which was amazement at having the ability to write instructions that caused the system to do stuff, like make dumb games initially in basic and then better games in assembly.
You were the exception too. A PC was one of the most expensive items in my house when we bought it. The computer table it sat on was the second most. I was so afraid of doing anything on it that'd break it. Heck I freaked out one time when I shut it down from the power button directly.
Most kids only knew how to type LOAD ""
Some kids thought it was awesome to make the computer do stuff and learned how to program.
My Acorn BBC Model B booted straight into BBC BASIC as well, and I too thought it was awesome and taught myself BASIC straight away, and then 6502 assembler and latterly BCPL and so on. I was even younger than OP.
But I think we were the exception, even if we didn’t realise it at the time. In hindsight, my interest was most definitely not shared by my peers.
I think you’re half right. To echo the other comments, I think 8 is too young for most kids to get into BASIC. I learnt programming on BASIC but I was 12 or so and had a teacher and hence structured guidance. I don’t know that I had the mental capacity to self-teach that kind of programming even at 12, let alone 8!
But 8 is not too early to learn programming as such, because my kids started around that age. Only they started creating dumb games using Scratch in a modern browser on a full-fledged modern OS. The environment you start with probably matters a lot for how much you take to it.
I'm not even that old, but totally agree with this sentiment. Going to miss those times. It's amazing being able to build whatever you want now, but it's bittersweet because if you truly wanted to learn how to do it, you could do it yourself.
I don't understand this. Back in the early days of the internet, you absolutely couldn't learn 'how to do it' without finding obscure books or knowing someone. Now though? You can learn all of it, and find the resources almost instantly. Want to build a computer, self host, program, you have millions of resources at your hand.
There were a lot of books written back then on programming. My local book shops had a section dedicated to computer programming - including all the popular programming languages of the day like C, C++, Basic (and eventually Visual Basic), Java and so on. The books were technical and specific, but they were incredibly easy to find. And back in those days book shops were everywhere.
I learned C, Java, JavaScript and Obj-C from books over the years. Those books were honestly much better resources for a beginner programmer than most online resources are today.
Things that are easy to do don't necessarily mean that's the right way to do it. Grueling work sometimes helped you learn far more than just getting the answer to something easy.
Back in the early days of the internet, there were FAQs written about everything. You could talk to people who actually knew what they were doing, as opposed to today.
>you absolutely couldn't learn 'how to do it' without finding obscure books...
QBasic's bultin help/documentation was good enough for me..
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I remember getting magazines with basic games, where the full syntax was printed out. I would type it in and save to floppies on my Apple 2e - which my mother purchased second hand.
That was my origin story. I was 8. Tandy CoCo2. I didn’t have a cassette so I had to type all the programs from the books. Again and again.
I hope this makes you feel better: all industries are doomed. But few rise and fall in one lifetime.
Same here but with the first CoCo, TRS-80.
Anyone remember "The Treasure of Raaka-Tu"?
I ended up a systems programmer in this doomed industry. BASIC on a Z80 didn't get me there (exploits on a DG/UX at a library system did.) Different people, different vectors.
I refuse the accusation - I had a very good idea what BASIC was even at 5 years old. QBASIC was the program that allowed you to open GORILLA.BAS and play the Gorilla fruit throwing game.
..at that time I have to admit, most of what I saw there went over my head. I understood the concept of program code, but had very little idea of what was going on, but wanted to learn. Eventually I started modifying the code, and started making my own stuff, driven mostly by determination rather than any understanding of what was going on.
Reading through all the comments, I think there’s also a bit of a generational gap here.
There’s a huge difference between a kid turning on a Commodore 64 or an Apple II and being dropped into the relatively no-frills versions the BASIC interpreter versus a kid in the early ’90s who had a DOS machine with MS-DOS 5 bundled with QBasic which IMHO is a more representative example of a “batteries included” BASIC environment that was significantly more user-friendly.
I also encountered QBASIC as an elementary school kid - it felt like the closest thing to sorcery. People who grew up in the age of the internet really underestimate how awesome it was to be able to just be able to place the cursor on a more obscure command (like PEEK/POKE or POINT) and see something like this:
I think the true generational divide was between DOS and Windows. After spending an inordinate amount of time in DOS (making the journey to Borland C), it felt awesome that you could draw onto the screen, no questions asked. I made so many games and graphical programs just drawing to the screen and then reading the input in a loop, it worked great.
Then I transitioned to Windows, and had to contend with all the complexity.. What's a Window Class and how do you write an event loop to respond to window messages, why is this all so complex.. Why is MFC somehow not really better.
Having written a simple DOS GUI (that kinda looked like Windows), I had to discover that a Windows app of equivalent functionality took more and messier code.
And forget drawing to the screen, you had to grapple with GDI drawing contexts, it was slow and bad.. (Not like Linux was any better than this regard).
As for DOS, I have had the privilege of hacking together a bitbanging VGA adapter, so I know for a fact that drawing to the screen is really as simple as setting values in an array, then, scanning it out to the display.
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If I remember correctly QBasic even allowed configuring and controlling serial/parallel ports. Just imagine what a guy could do with that if he was bold enough to poke wires into a parallel port....
Today, computers don't even have parallal/serial ports. Everyone has to pay the USB gods their tribute to have the mercy of allowing to program arbitrary IO from their computers....And they still need some kind of serial receptacle on the other end...
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Yes! Paraphrasing my childhood:
“Mom, I’m bored will you buy this a new computer game?” “Lol no! Go outside.” “Well crap. I guess I’ll have to write my own game.”
fond memories modifying the variable for velocity in GORILLA.BAS before I really knew what velocity was :)
I don't remember there being any filesystem at all, let alone FAT.
This was me too, but objectively speaking we were in the minority. Most kids did not learn BASIC.
Nice attempt at slipping one past, but the industry is far from doomed. Where do you work now that you believe that?
Holdouts feel everything is doomed.
Adopters feel the future is brighter than ever.
Article author is excited. I am too.
There's nothing to be excited for. Even if AI works as well as people say (and to be clear: it very much doesn't), that future sucks ass. No more fun making things, no fun solving problems, just hand it off to the machine that does things for you. That's an awful future where every shred of joy is gone from computing.
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I exist outside your dichotomy.
I feel like the future is bright precisely because AI sucks so bad while also lowering the bar.
It made people not take software and software engineers for granted. Public perception of software has also finally matured. Boomers and tech CEOs fell into a tarpit that harshly exposes their stupidity while laypeople now feel like they can change the system.
This is all exciting in the best ways. My usage of AI at work and for personal projects goes as far as whatever the AI summary is on google. That's more than enough for me to get enough of a productivity boost on par with those who embarrassingly thrust themselves balls deep and refuse to pull out. Not everyone has to push the "I'm feeling lucky" button to get the same work done at the same pace.
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Yes! I loved BASIC! It was what got me hooked on computers.
lucky people, as soon as I learn how something works it's pretty much impossible for me to keep any interest in it
> lucky people, as soon as I learn how something works it's pretty much impossible for me to keep any interest in it
I guess that means you are still interested in pretty much everything
Naw, you had the knack.
"doomed industry?"
Please.
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