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by CoolGuySteve
3330 days ago
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The video game crash of the early 80s put a stop to those cheap programmable computers. By the 90s, any cheap home computer, like the NES/SNES/Genesis/Gameboy was not programmable by the end user. When I was a kid, I learned BASIC on a 10 year old Tandy 80 to write games like I had on my NES (which was marketed solely to boys btw). Eventually my dad dropped $2000 on a 486 (and subsequent upgrades) and that's when I was able to start writing C with the DJGPP toolchain, installing Linux, rebuilding machines out of spare obsolete parts, etc. If my family wasn't well off, there's no way I'd have progressed past having known BASIC for a couple of summers. I think this is a common refrain for anyone born between about 1980 and maybe 1995. By 2010, there were cheap laptops, netbooks, and whatnot. |
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I was born at the end of 1984 and played games on it with him from around age 3, then started tinkering myself and learning how to load games and play them at around age 5. In another couple of years I was going to the library and checking out books full of lengthy game listings in BASIC, painstakingly typing them in, running them and saving them to tape. That experience basically ignited my love for computers and for programming. When the family managed to get a cheap PC I was about 9 or 10 and I spent as much time on there as I could, learning how to use MS-DOS 5, Windows 3.1 and playing games.
After this point I scrounged whatever hardware I could - I acquired an old IBM 286 with an EGA monitor that a local school wanted to get rid of, various other components, borrowed software off friends to copy the disks, etc. My parents were pretty supportive and at age 13 they were a little better off - I persuaded them to get me my own PC as a joint birthday and Christmas present, using an old monitor and peripherals we already had. I got access to the internet and started viewing the source of web pages, copying the HTML, learning what it did and editing it to make my own pages. I started to learn CSS, how to edit images and how to write Perl.
The story goes on and on - I'm mostly just going on a bit of a ramble about my past and fondly remembering all the experiences I had. The point is that yes, if your family is absolutely on the breadline while you're growing up then you probably won't have access to this stuff, but we were by no means upper middle class and I managed to get a great start with computing. It's mostly about passion and people looking out for you. I scrounged so much old hardware and software from people who didn't want it any more because I knew it'd be a fantastic learning experience, and I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged me to do this and didn't spend the _entire_ summer telling me to go outside and "do something".