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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. |
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.