Yet magazines and books commonly published program listings for games in BASIC which many kids somehow managed to type in and run.
>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.
Until like a year ago.
I would start with a completely blank slate and then, gradually, be able to create something out of nothing. If I was clever enough, it could do whatever I wanted (as long as my wants were modest). It was magical and I have nothing but fond memories of the time I spent doing that.
Trying to correctly render a vertical blinking cursor on top of proportional fonts took me ages to get right...ish.
They can't have sucked that much if you saw fit to build a career around them.
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1421/sharp-pc-1246/
This was the very opposite of unsatisfying. I don’t recognise this idea that computers sucked.
AI-assisted coding is, to me, way more soul-destroying than hitting the limits of a simple home computer. In most regards I feel like I have reached the end of my interest in computing, and the pivot I had in mind — teaching - looks like it has been joy-deadened too. Nobody is going to want to learn how anything that is not AI actually works, tech people insist that AI will replace (they say augment, they mean replace) teachers and trainers, politicians seem to be listening, and non-tech people now increasingly resent technology.
I barely recognise the industry I spent my life in; I do not recognise the evident enthusiasm for a world that is abandoning a whole, transformative pedagogy in favour of the programming equivalent of games consoles: button pushing vibes.
I am not at all of the opinion that AI has no value, though it does not have anywhere close to the value people insist it must have for me. I am learning, trying to find an ethical angle on it that doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable and exhausted by the hype.
But it is the final nail in the coffin of the joy of tech work for me, and as a single middle-aged man I perceive this as life changing and very likely life-shortening, in the way that psychologically unhealthy things are a health risk for older adults: unless I find something that gives my work life a sense of connected purpose again, I figure I will be gone before the Spectrum makes it to fifty.
So yeah, no. No.
I disagree with most of your post, but this one the most.
Non-tech people already resent technology... Try and sit next to a non tech person use a desktop pc. It wasn't until the smart phone that the average person started to use technology like you or I recognise. And that's only because it's been simplified to the extreme for them. (I don't blame them btw).
AI is such a step change for learning and teaching... For anyone who is inquisitive. Ask it endless questions, explore ideas, get it to generate images to help you...
Same here. I can understand indifference, but this I don't get.
FFS I even loved playing with calculators!
Why did you think that? Did you see people use it like that? anything? really?
For me, computers became intriguing after I started programming in BASIC. Not before that. Before that I was just curious about what the big deal about these things are...
In the literature, there would be passages that describe how computer followed "instructions", but I never could make sense of that or understood what an "instruction" was. So it didn't really sway me either way. I just tried hard and remained curious to understand what this "instruction" was and how I could give it to computers...
May be your falling the same way for LLMs now..
I have never found computers disappointing, and I have spent most of my career/life learning about them - from processor design through to distributed systems. Mostly I've been disappointed in the disparity between the number of interesting things I'd like to do, and the number of lifetimes I have available to me.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Yes, but they would say the same about any other programming language too.
BASIC was common on the Apple ][ series, and in the Win95 era QBasic was popular.
It was not impossible to have access to computers in the educational environment (either in class or as an extracurricular) before middle school, either.
20 goto 10
20 goto 10
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.
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).
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…