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by harry-wood 1357 days ago
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.
3 comments
stevekemp 1357 days ago
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!

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sshagent 1356 days ago
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.

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_joel 1357 days ago
Similar feels but for a 1996 Linux book at Christmas
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