[K0balt]

It’s truly remarkable to me that in the late 70s/early 80s it was considered that programming your own computer in basic was not something that required special skills or technical ability.

It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped, with basic human ingenuity and capability for expression having been crippled by reliance on increasingly advanced automation with increasingly simple interfaces.

Humanity is not going to fare well in the world of pervasive synthetic intelligence with simple language interfaces. I fear we will see an unprecedented dumbing down of the population, a new “dark age” perhaps.

[zoeysmithe]

I was little little during this time and the percent of adults that owned computers was tiny and the percent who could program them was even tinier. I think its very easy to fall for "le wrong generation" narratives because they are so ego pleasing to think things only got this way recently. That people are somehow magically 'dumbed down' now.

When instead its always been like this. That certain types of people do certain things and others are highly disinterested in it, and this sort of modern 80s or 90s renaissance never occurred. It was the same tiny community of people doing the highly technical work, just like today.

[Supernaut]

> its always been like this. That certain types of people do certain things and others are highly disinterested in it

I agree. I remember 1984, when all of my schoolyard peers had a home computer. It was only myself and one other guy that ever experimented with our systems' integrated BASIC. Everyone else exclusively used their computers for gaming. Unsurprisingly, the other programmer and I are the only two who subsequently made careers in IT.

[Jtsummers]

> It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped

Those computers were vastly simpler, and many weren't connected to any kind of external network (or the networks were, again, vastly simpler). It's like the difference between a Model T era car (many people possess the technical ability to maintain them, even today) versus a modern car.

It's not that we expect less of people today, we've just produced something much more complex so what it even means to understand or use a computer has changed, because it's not the same thing as 40-50 years ago. If I threw an Apple II level computer at someone today, I'd expect as much from them as throwing the same computer at someone in 1980 (actually more, they'd have more foundational knowledge than a random person in 1980 would have).

[HankStallone]

Also, as programming languages have gotten more powerful, I think they've gotten so they require a particular kind of mind to work with. I could teach anyone with a little interest and aptitude to program in BASIC 2.0, because there aren't any hard concepts. Variables are global, there's no recursion, no objects, not really even functions, just subroutines. So you've got looping and variables, just enough to let you do some calculations and put things on a screen. Pretty simple. Also, my Commodore 128 came with a System Guide in which over 100 pages were a pretty solid BASIC instruction and explanation of every command. So if you bought one of those machines, there was a good chance you'd at least tinker with BASIC. You had to learn a couple commands just to use the thing, after all.

Moving to something modern, even a language that's considered easy to learn like python, you very quickly get into more complicated concepts. That seems to have created a situation where the easier and more powerful we make programming for programmers, the more it gets out of reach of anyone else. Though there are still languages specifically for learning (like BASIC), so that doesn't have to be a problem.

[microtherion]

I think it's the opposite: our expectations have RISEN to an extent that it's harder for beginners to get started.

One of my sons was interested in learning programming, but the goal he envisioned was to write an AAA game. It was rather discouraging to have to tell him that it would take a minimum of 5 years (realistically more) to get to the level where he could consider getting hired into a team of hundreds to work on such a game.

In contrast, the first computer I had access to had a whopping 7167 bytes of RAM to work with, and a 25x40 character screen. Correspondingly, our ambitions were much more limited.

I recently started reading back issues of Dr. Dobb's magazine (the internet archive has issues until about 1990: <https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal?and%5B%5D=creat...>), and many articles seem to fall into the categories of either being fairly simple (mostly games), or visions of overly ambitious projects that likely never came to fruition (a multi user UNIX system implemented on an 8080 system with 32K RAM and a floppy drive, to be written by somebody who encountered his first computer two years earlier…).

To be sure, there were also quite sophisticated programs, such as a 6502 floating point package co-developed by Steve Wozniak.

[K0balt]

To be sure, the barrier to entry on professional level development is higher, but we also have chip-8, python, arduino, and other languages and systems that are arguably much more approachable than BASIC with a line only editor.

Many commenters have pointed out that it was always a tiny fraction of people that could do this kind of thing, and I think that’s probably true, in retrospect. My ideas about the subject are probably colored by the fact that it always seemed easy to me, and I assumed (at the time) that others would also find it easy because I hadn’t come to grips with the bell curve yet. But if I think critically, there was basically no one I knew that was doing anything more ambitious than typing in games from magazines at that time…. So perhaps my worries about the dumbing down of society are overblown?

After all, it’s not like no one is graduating high school or something.

[cmrdporcupine]

I grew up in this era, owned a VIC-20, and it's simply not true that many people were doing anything useful with the rather awful BASIC dialects that shipped in microcomputers. They were just a pain to work with -- no real editor, etc and often missing the ability to even use the graphics etc functions of the computer they shipped on (esp on Commodore devices). Professional developers mostly wrote to assembly.

We did BASIC (& Logo) programming in my elementary school, on Apple IIs. It's rare anybody got past basic "hunt the wumpus" programs.

There were program listings for simple games in the back of computer magazines of the era. Invariably the better ones were full of DATA statements at the end that were bits of 6502 or Z80 machine code to do the "real" work. Woe befell you if you typed them in slightly wrong.

Later, mostly in the "16-bit" era, we got structured BASIC varieties with better/real editors, and that definitely changed things. I got a lot done in GFA Basic on my Atari ST. But it's debatable if GW-BASIC, GFA Basic, (and later Visual Basic) etc were "really" BASICs... they were more like ... permissive and weird Pascal.

[simmerup]

People probably say the same about how we don't have looms in the house anymore and no one can repair their own clothes

Just because it's a skill you value doesn't mean its a skill others value

[HeyLaughingBoy]

No, it's that those expectations were wrong in the first place.

I spent a fair amount of time in the early-mid 80's tutoring engineering students in Computer Science (basically a CS101 for non-CS students). A fair number of otherwise very smart people simply couldn't grasp the concepts beyond the very basics.

[Pamar]

I am from that era, so I might add something that perhaps is not obvious at all nowadays.

The microcomputer explosion gave birth to an large number of actual paper magazines and at least 50% of their content were... actual source listing you had to manually retype. Basic was already fragmented in a billion different flavors and dialects (especially if your program had any kind of graphics) so the more ambitious user could also try their hand at translating a listing from - say - TSR-80 to Apple Basic.

In any case you were directly exposed to the actual source code, and tweaking or experimenting with it felt very natural.

[forinti]

I think you overestimate the number of people who could actually do something useful with BASIC.

[K0balt]

That could be. It was easier than assembly, at least, and as long as you could use peek and poke you could still get into the nitty gritty when you needed to. I remember using data statements as a memory space to communicate between my machine code and basic since it wasn’t really supported lol.

[Cthulhu_]

And yet, people struggle; I read a post earlier about someone who tried to get elderly people onboarded with their iDevices, and they couldn't make heads or tails from it, already struggling with the PIN input. Mind you I'm sure they would've struggled with basic and everything in between too.