6 Apr
2020
6 Apr
'20
8:09 p.m.
On Apr 6, 2020, at 10:00 AM, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
They play with the
pennies to discover that they can roll around, and learn that they're not
food or nasal suppositories,
I was with you up till here, but wait, what?
I?m one of those kids who was just the right age.
Five years older and I would have been in the Car Club, and would have ended up being a
damn good mechanic without a lot of career opportunities.
Five years later and not every damn computer on the planet would have come with a BASIC
interpreter in ROM and who knows what my tinkering instinct would have led to.
But I, born in 1971, had an Atari 2600 and its BASIC programming cartridge, and in the
fall on 1982 I got a VIC-20, and sometime in 1983 my parent bought me an Apple //e.
So I did grow up with Microsoft BASIC as my first language, and, sure, it doesn?t lend
itself well to structured programming, but then when I wanted to know ?well how do you do
_that_?? I ended up in 6502 assembly, and picked up P-System PASCAL and Logo along the
way. Then in the summer of ?89 I interned in a physics department, and got OK at Turbo
Pascal and sort-of-vaguely-able-to-write C.
College brought REXX on (IBM VM/CMS; I didn?t get an Amiga until the 2010s, well after its
relevance) and Perl and Scheme and SPARC assembly, and grad school (both for irrelevant
degrees: Ancient Mediterranean Civilization and History?but wait, there?s a footnote)
680x0 assembly and Java. (The footnote is, well history of computing, so I got a lot of
deep-dive stuff into other languages and architectures.) Since then, whatever I needed to
learn when I needed to learn it. I?ve programmed COBOL for money, which has joined the
ranks of things I?m not super-proud to have done for money but hey it paid the bills when
I needed it.
Since then?Python, C, Go, TypeScript, whatever was needed. These days it?s mostly
Python.
But really what it was was that I was lucky enough to be in that small age window where
computers were, one the one hand, something middle-class families could afford while still
being capable of doing cool things, and on the other hand, simple enough that a smart
adolescent could pretty much understand them more-or-less in their entirety.
Adam
7 Apr
7 Apr
6 a.m.
Indeed. My dad worked at Bell labs in the 1970's and when I was in third
grade he brought home a TRS80 Model 1 Level 1 to do work on. It had a
game on cassette called space war or something that I always wanted to
play but he had to load it. Finally he taught me how to CLOAD to get me
out of his hair so I could play it.
When I got bored I found the other game he had for it on cassette:
"Introduction to programming". And that night my parents came into the
living room to find me running my first program: Termites. Which would
fill the screen then randomly turn off pixels to simulate termites
eating your house down....
Got better from there. But I still value basic for the quick use of MID$
and Len(x$) to quickly parse strings of text.
CZ
On 4/6/2020 11:09 PM, Adam Thornton via cctalk wrote:
On Apr 6, 2020, at 10:00 AM, cctalk-request at
classiccmp.org wrote:
They play with the
pennies to discover that they can roll around, and learn that they're not
food or nasal suppositories,
I was with you up till here, but wait, what?
I?m one of those kids who was just the right age.
Five years older and I would have been in the Car Club, and would have ended up being a
damn good mechanic without a lot of career opportunities.
Five years later and not every damn computer on the planet would have come with a BASIC
interpreter in ROM and who knows what my tinkering instinct would have led to.
But I, born in 1971, had an Atari 2600 and its BASIC programming cartridge, and in the
fall on 1982 I got a VIC-20, and sometime in 1983 my parent bought me an Apple //e.
So I did grow up with Microsoft BASIC as my first language, and, sure, it doesn?t lend
itself well to structured programming, but then when I wanted to know ?well how do you do
_that_?? I ended up in 6502 assembly, and picked up P-System PASCAL and Logo along the
way. Then in the summer of ?89 I interned in a physics department, and got OK at Turbo
Pascal and sort-of-vaguely-able-to-write C.
College brought REXX on (IBM VM/CMS; I didn?t get an Amiga until the 2010s, well after
its relevance) and Perl and Scheme and SPARC assembly, and grad school (both for
irrelevant degrees: Ancient Mediterranean Civilization and History?but wait, there?s a
footnote) 680x0 assembly and Java. (The footnote is, well history of computing, so I got
a lot of deep-dive stuff into other languages and architectures.) Since then, whatever I
needed to learn when I needed to learn it. I?ve programmed COBOL for money, which has
joined the ranks of things I?m not super-proud to have done for money but hey it paid the
bills when I needed it.
Since then?Python, C, Go, TypeScript, whatever was needed. These days it?s mostly
Python.
But really what it was was that I was lucky enough to be in that small age window where
computers were, one the one hand, something middle-class families could afford while still
being capable of doing cool things, and on the other hand, simple enough that a smart
adolescent could pretty much understand them more-or-less in their entirety.
Adam
1720
days inactive
1720
days old
1 comments
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participants (2)
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