[sshagent]

Most my friends had Spectrums, i was looking forward to gaming when Santa would surely bring me one too. Alas i got an Acorn Electron. Turns out, having the different system that my extended friend group meant i spent time messing about with coding than gaming. So whilst 'young james' was probably unreasonably unhappy with that Christmas, i think in hindsight it was amazing :)

[harry-wood]

Similar. That Christmas when my dad & I started working through the BBC BASIC manual, I thought that this was the exciting experience of owning a computer which my friends were all on about (and I was excited by it!)

...It was only some time later I learned about loading pre-written programs (games) on it.

[stevekemp]

I've written about this before in more detail:

https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html

But the reason I started coding in BASIC was because when we received a ZX Spectrum for Christmas one year the cassette player was broken - no preloaded games for us.

I was always more interested in programming, and hacking games for infinite lives than actually playing games!

[sshagent]

Exactly that. In some ways i'd love to have some of that old code, as icky as it would likely be to view now.

Does make me wonder how kids of today just start coding, without having to fuss about dev environments. Listening to my young nephew talking about doing python at school sounded encouraging, but python is hardly "I want to learn to python, starting coding in python". Lots of fiddling about. Still he seems to enjoy it.

[_joel]

Similar feels but for a 1996 Linux book at Christmas