[pjmlp]

Back in the 80's having 10 year olds show off Z80 Assembly on their Speccy and C64 wasn't that extraordinary, what was impressive is the ideas many would think of without nothing else besides a couple of books and nothing else.

I am sure what I am telling here, because I was one of those kids, with whatever we could get from the local library, coupled with Input magazines, and some Portuguese newspapers with computing stuff on fridays (A Capital).

By 14 I was already into Demoscene stuff.

EDIT: Naturally it was 6502 on the C64.

[Y_Y]

Is there any modern equivalent? If you could control a child's computer access and didn't care about them missing out on tiktok etc what would you do? Of course a refurbed ZX Spectrum is an option, as is Scratch or some other hand-holding environment. I'd be interested to know if anyone is raising tough, rugged, Mel-type hackers[0] these days, and how they're going about it.

[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

[vundercind]

The modern equivalent doesn't look the same at all if you want equivalent motivation.

We all dicked around with "shitty" computers and learned all the stupid trivia you had to memorize to use them, back then, because that's all there was and you could make your own bad text adventure or crack some commercial game or whatever and your friends might think it's cool, because that was state of the art, or close to it, and anyway you had to get about half-way to being able to program a computer just to be able to run games or play around in a text or image editor. The extrinsic motivation for hacking on some modern C64 clone or what have you is far lower than it was then.

Minecraft modding is probably the closest modern equivalent.

[filoleg]

I agree with your take, just wanted to add Roblox to that list containing Minecraft modding as well.

Kids create almost full blown games in Roblox these days. Most of what they create is ofc extremely basic and is of poor quality, but they are kids. And the outliers can get pretty insane, in a good way.

[jdwithit]

Yeah I think this is a good point. Around ~8th grade I got pretty far into making a Final Fantasy 6-inspired JRPG in QBASIC with some friends. Obviously it was not remotely professional quality. But the delta between it and a "real" game wasn't THAT insane. There's only so much you can pack into little 8 or 16 bit sprites. It's very easy to write a 2D tile based engine, there was a lot of info on the Internet about it even then back in the late 90s. I didn't need to know college level math to do basic 2D rendering and effects. If making a somewhat presentable game in the 90s interested you, it was all pretty attainable with study and work.

Nowadays, for my own kids, the equivalent would be trying to write... Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom from scratch? Which is like asking them to solve cold fusion based on a middle school understanding of science. It's laughable. Making "old grandpa games" doesn't motivate them. Which is a bummer, because hacking on that crappy QBASIC RPG definitely set me on the path to a lifelong interest and career in tech. (Unfortunately it was never finished, because my HDD died, and the backup I periodically dumped to a floppy was unreadable, so several years of effort were lost. Great early lesson about backups not meaning shit unless you regularly test that you can restore them...).

[warpspin]

I am skeptical that this can be repeated at all nowadays the way we had it in the 80ies and 90ies (or even earlier, but I'm an 80ies child, haha). At best with some kind of limited hardware or in some narrow area like writing games. Also, surely not with Scratch. Scratch is, what you give a 5 year old to learn some concepts in my opinion. My children were appalled by it when they became 10 cause it's "baby stuff". At least those kids interested in programming.

The thing in the 80ies and early 90ies was, that you could actually, as a kid, compete with something professional and have total control over the outcome, if you had a bit of talent in any area. This was unbelievably motivating.

Where can one person or two people nowadays seriously compete with professionals and have serious control over the outcome? If at all in the area, where you will actually find kids today: Roblox games, Unity games, anything with a finished engine, where they can focus on the content itself because anything else will simply be unrealistically large effort.

Also, limited retro hardware things might work, I do not know. For me, if I was a child again, they would not work because these are things that are too limited - I would always know there are really powerful PCs with all 3d stuff around. As said above, the fantasy of being able to do anything some software company could do was what motivated me in the 80ies/early 90ies, so I'd rather probably teach myself some game engine, too, because that allows me to live the state-of-the-art fantasy. At least I assume that.

Another thing old hardware did, by the way, which modern hardware does not, is that it launched people on a programming learning path immediately, if they desired to successfully use it. You could not use a C64 without learning at least a tiny little bit of basic.

[sumtechguy]

> I am skeptical that this can be repeated at all nowadays

For me I think it was more of an access issue that caused me to want to do it. Once you were done with the 2-3 games you might have. You started getting the mags from the library and typing things in and hoping it would work (no typos!). Just so you could get another game.

Along the way you picked up tons of low level programming. The computers of the time were 'batteries included' usually including some form of BASIC and then an escape into the world of ASM if you knew the right incantations. After awhile you would find hey this programming thing is sort of fun too.

But today a kid has some access to things like what you point out. But however they also have access to thousands of other games for a very reasonable price. The older systems you better be committed to getting that game you wanted as they were decently priced high enough you had to shell out a decent amount of cash to get it. With free to play and thousands of low priced games plus the massive catalogs of older systems. Getting a game is now 'easy' and cheap.

On my old computers apple2, c64 and ti994a the prompt to launch things was a programming prompt. With the GUI world there is no prompt just files and icons. Getting an IDE setup on most modern systems is not hard but it is an extra step (and fiddly with some of them). You are then presented with a blank canvas but you have to know how to fill out the form to get it to do anything at all.

Could we replicate the old systems? Totally. Would anyone actually use them? Not so much as to 'get things done' the GUI is way better. There is a step missing if we want to replicate what we had. But is 'what we had' the right way to program? That I am not convinced of. Pretty sure if I said 'yes' that would be my bias of using it that way showing. We would have to have a different way that still brings people up step by step we had but fits into the current landscape of computers.

[johnnyjeans]

I sincerely doubt it.

One of the more underexamined consequences of computers being so ubiquitous and widespread is how it's affected child rearing. Any parent or anyone who works with children knows one of the most important parts of child rearing is socialization. It's imperative that your child gets along with other children, always has been. Today, with children being given access to social media, that means that your child too will have to be given access to social media in order to fit in. The reason being that this is what kids will talk about amongst each other primarily, it will constitute much of their interests early in life.

The problem of course with this mandatory exposure is that it's vampiric. The odds of getting a kid into 6502 assembly after they've been exposed to the monoamine explosion of trite garbage like TikTok may as well be an impossibility. Deprive them of that explosion... they'll probably not have a good time with their peers. Social ostracization will harm their personal development, and they will experience it if they can't yap about the latest memes with the other snotlings. They'll grow to resent you for making them the weirdo with nil cultural knowledge.

It's a rather worrisome situation, honestly. The best route to getting kids into programming, in my opinion, is through Roblox or making Fortnite custom maps. It's stuff they can share with their friends in a medium that they'll enjoy and think is cool. It fits in with their cultural motions. If you do a good job of encouraging their experiences doing so and instilling a hunger for more and deeper knowledge, eventually they'll move on to greater horizons.

I say this as someone that's absolutely loathe to do any of this. I would want to raise my child on Plan 9. Teach them how to write 6502, how to write lua, how to write C. But it's just not how the world works anymore.

[KerrAvon]

The answer is to find like-minded parents and form schools with their kids. This is hard to do, but it is the only real answer.

[tiahura]

It can, you just have to have the right wife.

[wing-_-nuts]

I highly recommend hooking your kid up with pico-8.

It's a simple little 'fantasy' console with tons of tools to make gamedev streamlined. It's really caught on fire with the gamedev community and you can tell there was a lot of pent up creativity out there that was sick of the complexity of modern gamedev and just wanted a tight little environment to make simple indie games with. I'm not doing a good enough job describing it, but the website is below and check out the youtube overview.

https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXveyqOYB5w

[Caius-Cosades]

Well there probably would be more those kind of genius-autist-savants if children were allowed and encouraged to pursue their interest. Instead what usually happens when and if a child becomes obsessed with some topic is that instead of allowing child to pursue what he is passionate about by guiding a child towards a more constructive path(if necessary), he gets penalized for it. Repeatedly and as often as it takes for the child to stop dreaming. And that is such an incredibly stupid waste of human resources.

[pryelluw]

Yep, same here. I didn’t know what I wasn’t supposed to do so I tried whatever. Spending hours just typing nonsense until something worked. Getting the monitor to display different colors was certainly exciting! I never made it into demos but sure did spent way too much time poking around my c64.

[warpspin]

Dito. Started c64 scene at 12. You had to not talk about your age back then, though.

[deterministic]

Those were good days! I was learning machine code programming from a book as well when I was 11. Hand translating assember to bytes. No internet. Nobody to help when I got stuck. Just my (constantly crashing when I got it wrong) ZX-Spectrum and a book. Those were fun times!