[ekianjo]

> I wonder if youngsters who didn't grow up thinking 1 MHz is a perfectly acceptable CPU speed and that 640 KB is a whole lot of RAM will understand what the fuss is about here...

They won't, and thus they don't understand the value of demos in the first place. But don't blame them, even back in the days I knew many people who could not appreciate demos either.

[skrebbel]

Stop generalizing. Plenty will.

[ekianjo]

> Stop generalizing. Plenty will.

Look at modern forum discussions on Smartphones, it's full of youngsters comparing specs of their respective phones without grasping at all what they mean. Or maybe you are referring to a highly educated subset of youngsters, but that's very few of them.

[tripzilch]

You should meet some of these youngsters :) A few weeks ago, I taught 12 year old kid to write a mandelbrot zoomer in Processing--no, really I taught him the required basics of complex numbers, took about 2.5-3 (very fun) hours[0]. Afterwards we had a big A3 piece of paper with notes, graphs and formulas all over it, which he took home with him.

Two weeks later I met him again, of course I wanted to continue teaching him. I thought maybe the Z^4+C variant would be a nice step further. Turns out he already had written the Julia version of the zoomer ... on his Android phone, while waiting at the dentist's ... O_o

Now I used to be all about fractals when I was his age, later grew up to be a 4096 byte democoder (around 2000), I was sooo jealous, what I wouldn't have given for a pocket computer that powerful! Lucky kid :)

Aaanyway, apart from sharing this cute anecdote, my point is this. There's some extremely clever young bastards out there. Now there's not many, but they're also not extremely rare. I know a handful, although this particular guy is probably the cleverest right now. They come from all sorts of backgrounds, too. But the important part is not that they're highly educated, but that they're highly educatable, and given the opportunity to develop this. Their little hacker brains are hungry enough :)

Having written their own graphics code, running against CPU-limits (although we hit float precision before it got really slow), I'm sure he'd appreciate some of the awesomeness of stunts on a limited machine like the 8088. In fact one of the earlier graphics I programmed with him was something very similar to the circle interference pattern described in the article (it was mostly his own idea, playing with interference patterns, I just carefully nudged towards the classic demo effect, because I knew it'd result in a really cool effect).

[0] He already knew how to draw stuff with Processing. He already tried to look online for how the Mandelbrot algorithm works, but couldn't quite wrap his head around it. Missing bit of information turned out to be (a+b)(c+d)=ac+ad+bc+bd, hadn't learned that in school yet. If you explain i as rotation by 90 degrees, the rest becomes quite intuitive, visually. We also took a quick skim through that great WebGL-illustrated article about "How to fold a Julia fractal" (google it), while coding, way better than the five stapled pages I had when I was 15 :) :)

[Yen]

What environment did he use on an android? I would think programming on a small touchscreen device would be really tedious, wondering if there's something good out there.

[tripzilch]

Didn't ask. Probably just the standard Processing for Android thing? I'll get some more information next time I seem him.

Yes it's probably tedious, but when you're really into something, at that age, you just persevere because you can :) Also young children are incredible on touchscreens, small fingers and they grew up with them :) [I'm the opposite, I have some stress/burnout related tremors in my fingers, some mornings (when it's worst) I can hardly control the device's apps, let alone typing]

[detaro]

As if the majority of people had a clue about these things back in the day.

[ekianjo]

Probably more than now because computing was not really "mainstream" at the time. Before Win95 at least.

[boomlinde]

Computing was not mainstream, so kids had a better idea about it?

[pdpi]

I guess the kids who got it were a smaller fraction of the total population of kids, but a bigger fraction of the population of kids who owned a computer.

[azinman2]

This is HN, not Facebook.