[Brentward]

> There is no equivalent of this today.

I started using computers much more recently, but wouldn't any OS that boots into a TTY provide a pretty similar experience? I'm genuinely curious since I've never used a Commodore or BASIC. Is that environment much different from bash or another shell?

[brandonmenc]

It's very different.

Booting into BASIC is the equivalent of booting into an IDE. But one that a child could understand with a single page of instructions.

It's kind of hard to explain because computers were so simple that you didn't really need a shell.

But as someone who was there as a kid, I can say with certainty that there is no way I'd have been able to write a shell script back when I was writing BASIC programs that had loops and graphics.

[Brian_K_White]

Bash is easily more powerful as a programming language than basic, but basic is far more straightforward.

There are a much smaller number of special non-obvious tricks or special syntax to know in basic, while most of bash's features are invoked by arcane special syntax.

It's not necessarily easier to get something done in basic, but it's easier to understand what to do, and easier to read someone else's program and follow what does.

There must be more to it than the features of any language itself too. Many versions of basic are there to play with today, for free, and easy. The computer doesn't just boot to it directly, but I don't think that's all that important for the jump start. I think even getting the first print statement to actually work took a bit more effort for me that it would take today to google "how to program" or something to get to some sort of shell or interpreter prompt.

People are actively funnelled into being only consumers since decades ago.

Or maybe it's the same today as ever. There is no more Heathkit but there are certainly many modern equivelents. Maybe it was only a small percentage of people then who would build a Heathkit then, and a similar percentage today who trawl aliexpress for maker toys.

Maybe one difference is I think there is a lot more use of copyright and warranty or even insurance & liability to prevent people from tinkering. It's been a progressive process getting more common over time and the norm has changed over time. Now, every random thing in your life is presented to you as being a thing you may only use in limited procribed ways. Not only that things no longer come with tool kits and schematics, they are even suing people for growing plants from seeds from food you bought in the store. You may eat the vegetable, not put it into some dirt!

Even if your computer today does have access to a world of programming tools, you have just been trained never to be curious about the possibility in the first place, so it never even occurs to you to even look. Not everyone even has that much curiosity to begin with, and those that do are starved and stunted so it never develops.

And of course if all you have is a phone then forget it.

[taeric]

No, because there is no graphics in a tty. Something as simple as a dragon curve would be relatively difficult to get going nowadays.

That is, this is certainly close. But still a far cry from the environments we used to have.

I remember typing in screensaver style programs from magazines. Closest I know today would be Wireframe magazine and how it uses pygame zero. Which is awesome, but I don't know a computer that boots to that.