Did you ever play Another World by Erich Chahi? Still one of the greatest games and still good today.
One other game I absolutely loved for the Apple II was Captain Goodnight. I got really far into that game, but I don't think I ever beat it.
At the same time: a Raspberry Pi 2 W has more CPU power than all of the machines that I had between 1980 and 1991. The experience is still there. But it is very difficult to take a child from say 'Minecraft' to a blinking cursor on the screen and get them to be interested.
It was slow but allowed some text based games we then shared. No internet so did it all from trial and error.
Then ... i wanted a 3D Cube rotating. At 15/16 this was a bit too much i guess i had no idea about rotation matrices back then and deemed myself a bit dense.
Never got around doing 3D stuff at work, only databases all the time. I dabbled some with ThreeJS but i guess i was still haunted.
BUT THEN. Geometric algebra! So smooth. If you like tables and had problems with stuff like cross products or quaternions, didnt like copy pasting rotation matrices, etc. YOU WILL LOVE geometric algebra! It's like you meet 2 tables on a FK and bam its a volume (highly simplified!!)
Just my 2 cents. Don't write yourself off if you did not do 1337 demos in primary school on a tamagotchi.
I saved up to buy a VIC-20 (a 4K computer) and later a C64, writing games for both. Those were magical days I will look back to fondly. That sparkle has not left, though I sometimes miss the purity of near-bare-metal systems of yesteryear.
Like some in my generation, I lived through and contributed to some of the early phases of computing, pre-internet, and am altogether grateful for it.
When the teacher said show your work I wrote out the program I made to calculate the equation. They banned calculators altogether.
Once there was a computer I traded sleep to stay on it. I worked professionally for almost 3 decades and it ultimately cost me my health and mental health. It was often my own insecurities and anxiety that led me up the ladder.
I left the field and went to work for something I believe in and my tech skills are like wizardry to these folks.
There is a lot of blue sky to explore for people in tech.
Left to work in the arts.
Wish now I'd started earlier. It's like having a special power if your actual job isn't programming. I like getting the computer to do my job for me.
It was an ACE cracktro for International Karate that was putting huge things in the borders, something about it stuck to my mind.
Our very first "real" program was some local network chat system, which I found extremely fascinating - because I had suddenly gone from writing a bunch of terminal/CLI programs which felt a bit...boring, to writing something which felt like "proper" software.
nice blog :) cracked loose some fond memories.
Gonna take a look at the tutorial later this week, I always wanted a glimpse of how those demoscene folks did their magic.
I remember visiting repair shops for our aging color TV with my dad and being awed by the tables and shelves full of exotic-looking vacuum tubes, exposed CRTs, and dangerous-looking coils, and what I imagined to be the sorcerer-like skills of the man behind the counter who could divine their inner workings.
On weekends I would cajole my parents to drive me to the numerous electronic surplus stores, where I would marvel at tallboy-sized capacitors, which my father wisely prohibited me from buying.
Radio Shack was in its prime with walls covered in DIP chips and those "Electronic Project Lab" kits, of which I aspired to own the 300-in-1 version for $65 with a real breadboard and digital ICs. I vividly remember the birthday when I finally received it. I could seldom get the more complicated digital designs to work, which I've since learned was likely because breadboards are terrible for digital logic, but I was nevertheless entertained for countless hours.
Those were some of the most formative experiences of my childhood, and I too feel sad that they're becoming a thing of the past. You can open a modern electronic device and there's hardly anything in there that you can disassemble and re-use. And even if you could, the magic doesn't live there. When I was a kid, everything a device did was physically manifested in the arrangement of its parts. Now it only exists in firmware, invisible and inaccessible to the curious eye.
I suppose every generation feels nostalgia for the lost world of its childhood. But like you, I can't help but feel sad that no more children will get to experience that.
Edit: removing reference to the leading "How", that seems to be done editorially by the poster of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50227356
Last day, I realize it wasn't 2000. It was 8000, and there was not a snowballs chance in hell I could do the remaining 6000 in time for the deadline. So I went online, found pieces on stack overflow for this disgusting nodejs script that was 8 for loops deep, and then ran it against all the files. It took like.... a second, and all the files were just done. Poof, instant.
I got a job as a programmer and never looked back. The last ~decade has been a wild ride of highs and lows, but I still love doing it every day. There's just something deeply satisfying of taking an idea, and the computer just doing it.
In the evenings, after the kids go to sleep, I work on my side-project, an app that lets you preorder coffee from the local cafe so you don't have to wait so long. I've been working on it for six months and I dream of the day I can quit the day job and work on it full time.
… but don’t give me hate… I still code with my hands :)
I grew up programming and being obsessed with computers too, though in a very different world. I started working full time as a programmer this year and I haven't written a line of code. I just set the agent going and read reminiscent posts on HN like this about how great things used to be.
I feel like most of what I loved about programming has disappeared just as I truly began.
I also found that my brain has treated problem solving and building in general like gaming where every roadblock/problem/issue is like a level boss, and release to production is when you clock the game :)
So even if you’re spending 99% of your time in an agent cli rather than your editor, look at the problem you’re working on as a problem in itself and your task is to golf it - but as in one-shot prompts, but how can you do it to the best of your ability with sharp prompting.
But yeah, like a sibling comment said - keep it fun. I think if you get to serious then it takes the fun out of it… you’re no longer problem solving, you’re just stepping through the motions.
Oh… and also - treat everything like a learning experience and with the fascination like discovering Narnia... because If you’re not learning/growing/stressing even just a little in your current job, move on! You’re not doing yourself any favours staying stagnant… or maybe that’s terrible advice and I’m just addicted to constant fight-or-flight, high cortisol, and caffeine
I think I always had fun learning all the little knobs that a programming language would give you and where they made solving problems easier or more elegant.
You can get the same joy from working with an LLM when you have things setup correctly for example and you can say "handle these boring tickets for me" and if just "works" and works well.
Since the subject of BBS has been raised, I wanted to mention BBS-over-teletext, which used the bidirectional CATV connection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext#Uses They never took off, owing to the difficulty of typing with a remote control, but at least they did not hog the phone line, or rack up a bill.
Fast forward a few years, my mom, who was a teacher at the time brought home the materials from an HTML class she took. She never did anything with it, but I made a few Geocities pages.
I skipped over the whole Myspace customization thing because I was too busy fooling around with Arduinos. I ended up making a controller for the veggie oil system in my car using what I learned.
Lucky for me, I waited until about 2020 to start getting serious about doing it for a living, right as the bottom fell out of the industry, and here I am.
My first program was in 2nd grade on an Apple IIe in basic. It was a program to check if a word was worth a dollar (a=1, b=2, c=3...)
It became a family activity (every one taking turns at the computer) every night to just type in words and see what they came out to. It was all very boring.
I was sure I was going to win.
I lost (well 2nd place), to the kid with 6 older brothers, who had that many years of building out the family list.
BBSs were how I learned everything because there wasn’t really anybody near me in my little rural area of the world that had a computer let alone knew how to program them. Internet wasn’t public yet, just getting out of the lab.
What I grew up in was the counter-cultural era of tech. Distrust of authority. Freedom of expression. Queer. Weird. Against the War on Drugs, neoliberalism, police, all that.
Demos were huge. Scrolls were also huge. Mods were huge. Good times. When I think of back then I still hold out hope for today.
I've been behind the 8-ball at $dayjob, for reasons I don't have a say in, nor does anyone in my entire CoC. Vendors are delayed, we have hard shipping deadlines on our end.
Work pays for an expensive "AI" sub. I used it because I'm in a jam and deadlines are tight.
It worked. I'm a decent engineer/programmer. The tech saved me a month, at least. I think the money around all this tech is wrong and bad, but in a vacuum the tech works.
Best case, we are sitting in a tree, sawing off the very branch we're sitting on. Like we're having fun at a bar, never knowing when this particular one will close. While watching our friends, family, and everyone else out there lose their jobs, mentally we're all ready for that Friday 9 am "three person 1:1"
Ive also been deep in AI. Not only is AI inadequate for well engineered software, I think treating programming as a language translation task between spec and code boring. They're even worse for research, rabbit holes and bad lines of reasoning.
Im amazed people don't see how much smoke and mirrors even the frontier models and harnesses are using to mask the fact that they're reasonable sounding bullshit machines.