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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
(HTM) Childhood Computing
unmole wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
> The computers were very old IBM PC compatible machines, mostly with
monochrome cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors. They had no hard disks at
all. They had a few hundred kilobytes of RAM. Every time, we performed
the same ritual. Insert a 5¼-inch floppy disk to load MS-DOS into
memory. Then insert another disk to load LOGO.COM. Then write small
Logo programs and watch the turtle move.
I'm a few years younger than OP and grew up in a large Indian city, but
this matches my earliest experience exactly, right down to having to
take our shoes off before entering the computer lab.
dekdrop wrote 9 hours 50 min ago:
Many of us were introduced to computers as a means to use office suite
- MS office - in school. Computer usage was mostly surrounded by this
and other application programs. Teaching on programming the computer
was not there at all. In higher class, programming was introduced, but
only the syntax.
Chronos74 wrote 14 hours 6 min ago:
My entire life has revolved around tech as a result of a Tandy 1000 SX
in the mid 1980's. I'm not exactly sure how old I was, but it was
single digits when my dad brought it home. He worked for a small, local
retail chain and maintained their early computer-based point-of-sale
systems, along with a mainframe for their office. I learned how to
create batch files to set IRQ interrupts for the sound and graphics
cards to play games before I learned to write in cursive. I went to a
"computer camp" and learned how to write games in BASIC at 8 or 9, had
my first online experiences using TandyNet, and went on to create my
first website in the mid-90's using HTML 0.9. It was a crazy time, but
it led me to my current IT career of about 30 years.
jadbox wrote 13 hours 44 min ago:
I had the same Tandy 1000 SX and also a Commodore 64. My parents did
not approve of video game, so outside of pacman, these were equipment
to learn programming when I was in my single digits. My major
complaint of today's computers is that they are getting harder to
harder to 'learn' coding. When you used the Commodore for example,
the interface was the programming language. In a way, you HAD to
learn a little bit of programming to even use it. iOS devices for a
long time made local development an impossibility, although the
situation has improved a bit since the early days (still no JIT
allowed, but I digress).
Chronos74 wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
Yes, you really had to understand how a computer worked in order to
do the most basic things that are now just taken for granted. How
many people now even know what an IRQ interrupt is? Never mind
writing a script to set the system parameters required just to
launch a program.
mintflow wrote 14 hours 8 min ago:
I do not have the luck to get access to computer in my childhood.
But the articles still make me feel nostalgia, especially the sound.
With limited resource, people at that times just create some good
stuffs.
theragra wrote 14 hours 45 min ago:
Part about smell hit me strong. As a child of uni professor, I had some
access to university computer lab. The smell in professor room was very
plastic, dusty, a touch of burnt rubber. This smell meant a world to
me. Access to something absolutely magical: not only cool games, but
the world of adults who knew how to operate these machines.
I remember how at 12 or 13 year old, my father had given me a printout
of Turbo Pascal program that calculated square root equation, and told
me to print and run it.
That was a beginning of my programming career.
killerstorm wrote 15 hours 21 min ago:
I start with BASIC on ZX Spectrum and C64, then QBASIC on MS-DOS, Turbo
Pascal, etc.
I feel like it's more friendly and chill way to get into computing than
what kids get these days -- too many options, leaky abstractions, etc.
And it's not hard to go from BASIC to assembly to understand how
computer work on lower level - BASIC commands only do a little bit of
computing at a time, so you get used to it. While Python and JS line of
code can do a lot...
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 16 hours 27 min ago:
My start was a Heathkit programmable calculator, in the mid-1970s.
My first computer was a VIC-20, in 1982, or 1983. I got it while I was
still in tech school.
I used HP computers, at my day job, in the 1980s, to write ASM, Pascal,
and BASIC programs, for controlling GPIB-based test equipment. I was an
EE, and the coding was an âadjunct.â
My first real personal computer, was a Mac Plus, in 1986 (I was 24).
That was the one that started me really getting into coding.
lugu wrote 17 hours 53 min ago:
I installed Gnome on the home computer for the kids. I just realized
how disempowering the Gnome really is. I remember, as a kid, navigating
all menus to understand how it works. With Gnome, my kids barely can
set the background to an image, can't even have a solid color
background. I will probably move to DMS or KDE.
OhMeadhbh wrote 22 hours 31 min ago:
I upvoted this post because a) I love hearing people's memories of
their first programming interactions and b) Susam's website is
delightfully straight-forward: no ads, appeals to download AI apps and
the videos are in support of the text. I love it!
ruszki wrote 1 day ago:
One of my earliest memories is when I and my family draw and created
black and white pictures via a word processor on our C64. There were
characters which were different forms, like triangles, or small
rectangles. Nowadays there are similar ones in Unicode: [1] . As a few
years old kid, that was already magical for us at that time.
One of my nieces, could find an input field on my iPhone's lock screen,
and she played for quite long, just by typing emojis. Since, then my
"frequent emojis" list contains a lot of hearts, unicorns, horses, and
other animals. But of course, the difference compared to the old times,
that our C64 was probably the only computer in the whole small village
in Eastern Europe at that time, while my nieces encounter electronic
devices all the time, so they will probably not remember these as
starkly as I do.
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_Shapes_(Unicode_block)
keernan wrote 1 day ago:
I got my first computer when I was 26. It had taken 30 days to arrive
and when I got word I could pick it up, I left work an hour early,
rushed to the computer store, and was into my apartment by 4:30 or so.
I unpacked and set things up on my dining room table. The next thing I
knew it was 4:30am.
Things have been pretty much the same in the 48 years since.
bitwize wrote 1 day ago:
I was 4 when computing entered my life. My father was exploring some
engine design ideas and used a succession of devices, each more
powerful than the last but all proving futile. First it was a
scientific calculator, then a programmable scientific calculator. Then
he got one of those devices originally made by Sharp but
badge-engineered by Radio Shack which they called a "pocket computer";
very calculator-like, but had an alphanumeric keyboard and could store
and run BASIC programs written on it with a one-line display.
Ultimately he bit the bullet and went back to Radio Shack to buy the
most powerful computer they sold at the time: the TRS-80 Model 16. It
was a variant of their TRS-80 Model II business-class computer but with
a 68000 daughtercard with a quarter to half a meg of memory. He used
this to finally write the engine simulations he'd been planning in his
head all along, replete with graphical curve plots and an animation of
the piston turning the crankshaft. It ran at about four seconds per
frame, but it was still spectacular to behold. I was fascinated. I sat
there and watched him type in the programs line by line. I so
desperately wanted to poke at it myself, so to keep my grubby mitts off
his very expensive machine, my dad went down to Crazy Eddie's and got
me a Commodore VIC-20, cheap, for my fifth birthday.
My world had changed.
The VIC-20 came with an easy-to-read manual that introduced new users
to the basics of programming with the machine's built-in BASIC,
including POKE and PEEK commands that could be used to control its
display and sound capabilities. One of the example programs displayed
an animated "PETSCII bird" flying across the screen. Even though it was
nowhere mentioned in the book, I knew what had to be done: I had to
make that bird controllable with cursor keys.
And so I did it. It took me a couple days? few days? But I bent the
machine to my will, and I've been chasing that high for 43 years now.
LeoPanthera wrote 1 day ago:
For someone whose first computer was an Acorn BBC Micro in 1984, I have
never felt older than I do today.
daft_pink wrote 1 day ago:
I too started using computers at a young age and loved them and even
got my own Nintendo when I was young. I feel very conflicted about the
current anti screen fad. My son is very young and my wife doesnât
want him to use screens at all.
I donât want him to use tik tok or facebook but maybe I will buy an
apple 2 or setup a rpi emulator and play little old school games that
werenât available online.
pelasaco wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
i went the same road, and have great results. No mobile. Every night,
read books with the kids. Video Game in the weekend, only 2D games,
like Mario 3. Worked great for us. Now they are teenagers, doing well
in sports and school, have always a book with them, and no social
media.
zakisaad wrote 1 day ago:
We're currently at this stage with out kids, too.
I think the staunch "no screen" mentality is a broad-stroke lever
that non-technical thought leaders in the child wellness space have
stuck to, and I understand where they come from.
Though, as someone who owes his livelihood to being able to tinker
and experiment with technology as a child, I'm looking toward a more
measured approach. I may very well set up an airgapped Linux box
(Windows has come a long way since the XP days, and gone entirely the
wrong way) and let my kids proverbially "have at it" - this way, they
can't get stuck in big tech's psycho-loops or sucked into YouTube's
colourful dopamine machine - which I think, is the entire drive
behind "no screens".
I think well-measured exposure is imperative.
PebblesRox wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
We set up a âkid laptopâ for our kids (ages 3, 6 and 9) that
has a short list of allowed websites and a curated set of installed
programs.
We treat it like any other toy: they can pretty much play with it
whenever they want for as long as they want. Of course they have to
share it between the three of them, so thereâs a natural limit
there.
Every so often weâll add something new; most recently I installed
SimAnt after we were watching ants in our backyard.
So far weâve been very happy with this approach!
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
Also, on Logo, it's like the jump from C64 basic or CP/M Basic to VB6
but on steroids. UCB logo and manuals can be up to an SICP-lite level.
[1] Ah, yes, moving a turtle and yaddah yaddah. Yes, you have it, and
material on par (I am no kidding) to "Intro to symbolic computation"
from the Common Lisp world. The 3rd volume can be hardcore compared to
what I learnt in Elementary with Logo.
(HTM) [1]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html
darepublic wrote 1 day ago:
In 92 as I recall my school's unremarkable computer lab had apple iis
and Macintosh mix. We never learned any programming we wrote essays in
word software and got to play kidpix, Carmen San Diego, Oregon trail if
we were good
mfld wrote 1 day ago:
Does anyone remember the art of optimising MSDOS startup to have enough
free memory for games? And inspecting gorillas.bas? For me, this
probably contributed to an interest to learn more and experiment. In
fact, I'd like to encourage my son to a similar creative exploration,
but don't how this is going to happen when pulled into the current
generation of games and videos.
contingencies wrote 18 hours 15 min ago:
Indeed: config.sys autoexec.bat, EMS, HIGHMEM, and all those terrible
early sound blaster drivers, mouse drivers, network drivers... I
think the one I found hardest to get running was Quarantine. But it
was definitely one of the best games. So imaginative for the era. And
Australian! With music from some later famous bands! [1]
(HTM) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwO8XWbB1Pk&list=PLA5hK1g6CN...
(HTM) [2]: https://www.playdosgames.com/play/quarantine
endgame wrote 21 hours 56 min ago:
Yeah, I spent more time than I cared to admit fiddling with
DEVICE(HIGH) lines, tweaking FILES= and BUFFERS=, running
MEMMAKER.EXE over and over as if that would do something, but it was
never the real thing. The real thing is making the machine do
something I wanted instead of what the manufacturer wanted. For a kid
of this generation, I'd look for games with reasonable modding APIs,
perhaps something like Lua, and ideally something where playing
multiplayer lets him show his creations off to his friends.
From there, look to packages like LÃVE which still use Lua but give
full control over the whole game, and help him explore and wrangle
the things he needs to understand to make his programming real. And
if the lower levels interest him, help him dig deeper. But I think
modding and scripting is probably the best place to start.
nosioptar wrote 1 day ago:
It's been a long time, but I remember it a bit.
I also remember running over to the neighbor's to make a copy of a
working config file after effing up my config file. (Himem.sys?)
yason wrote 1 day ago:
I got my C64 in 1985. Obviously, I can revisit the graphics and sounds
of that machine online now, via emulators and youtube videos. But one
thing I always remember is the smell of warming circuit boards that
oozed from the casing soon after you turned on the computer.
Anecdotally, the cassette player that came with the machine had a
misconfigured tape head. Because there was no internet nobody knew why
it didn't load most of the games I got with the machine. However,
saving and loading programs did work. So, I started writing programs
from the user manual and game listings from some programming books I
found in the library, and saving them on my cassettes. Because the user
manual covered not only some tutorial BASIC but also the machine's
graphics, sprites, sounds, and what other features I eventually, after
getting some hang of writing BASIC, did also realize that what I could
create with the machine hardware itself was virtually unlimited. I
didn't necessarily know what the commands did with the underlying
hardware but I knew if I poked certain numbers into certain addresses I
could make my sprites appear on the screen and make them move around.
By the time I got the cassette player fixed by some computer repair
shop, learned about tuning the tape head, and I could finally load all
the games bundled with the machine, I was seriously hooked with
programming and the highly desired games no longer seemed that
interesting in comparison. I knew someone sat down and wrote all those
games and instead of playing them I could learn to do the same myself.
Been programming ever since.
jadbox wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
I LOVE how the C64 OS was a programming language (BASIC). Even if you
used the hardware the gaming, you had to learn a little bit of
programming (LOAD "*",8,1).
stevenwoo wrote 1 day ago:
I remember only having enough money to buy the C64 initially and
being so relieved to have the checksum on the typed in programs match
up, it was ephemeral but it was either that or cartridge programs.
The tape drive was the next purchase for me and finally the hard
drive. It was still a bargain for the features IMHO compared to the
Apple II and other competing devices like Sinclair and Ti99.
ido wrote 19 hours 4 min ago:
A hard drive for the c64? Are you sure you didnât mean the floppy
disk drive?
joak wrote 1 day ago:
Actually in 1982 I was able to store my programs on standard audio
cassettes. Hardware needed: a modem and a cheap tape recorder. My apple
II modem would chirp the ascii binary like Starwars' R2D2, I'd record
that and when needed I'd play it back to the modem.
RiverCrochet wrote 1 day ago:
You really used a modem instead of the tape out jack?
mikestaas wrote 1 day ago:
The tape jack is a modem.
erikbye wrote 1 day ago:
My childhood was PCBoard, POV-Ray, then later Lightwave, 3ds Max,
Bryce. WADs, Hammer Editor, GTkRadiant, both of the scenes. Sierra and
Lucasarts games... Turbo Pascal!
s1mon wrote 1 day ago:
I'm old enough and lucky enough to have had my first computing
experiences (1978-80) be on a teletype in our elementary school which
was connected to a minicomputer that the town owned. The connection was
an acoustically coupled modem/analog phone line that ran at 300 baud.
The exciting thing was to write very basic BASIC programs and see
results on the printout. There was no CRT, everything was via the
literal teletype - a keyboard and a clunky printer.
joak wrote 1 day ago:
You could use this audio at 300 baud by recording it on a standard
audio cassette. Then play the audio back as input to the modem to
retrieve the data
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
Minimodem does this.
nlawalker wrote 1 day ago:
A general thought on children and computers, not directly related, but
that I've always wanted to communicate here:
One of my strongest-held opinions is that children need to be taught,
explicitly and by example, that there is nothing you see on the screen
that simply "comes with" the computer, and that of all the
fascinating/distracting/useful things on the web, none of it just
"appeared." It is all the result of people making creative decisions
and doing creative, technical, intellectual work to bring ideas to
life.
Lots of stimulating books and messaging for children focus on how
things in society and in the physical world come to be. Holes are dug,
resources are gathered and processed, smart people create complex
things including machines that create even more complex things. People
perform hard labor to achieve amazing things. People gather, form
consensus, and create social structures and government. People have
ideas and create art. People observe problems and create solutions.
Children internalize this messaging and develop an appreciation and
understanding of how effort, creativity and intelligence result in
amazing things that make everyone's lives better, but (in my opinion)
that messaging was never sufficiently updated to ensure that that
appreciation and understanding extends to software, which increasingly
runs our world. We don't put enough effort into showing children that
their favorite games, all the stuff in all the menus on our phones, all
the software they use to learn or communicate or play, all of it is
made by people who had ideas, made design decisions, and then made them
real through accumulated wisdom and great intellectual effort.
Not every kid needs to "learn to code", but they should all learn that
everything they look at and tap on their screens was made by people who
did, and who wanted to make things to solve problems and make life
better.
It's unfortunate that the rise of AI slop has complicated this message;
that's all I'll say about that.
byzantinegene wrote 1 day ago:
very good point, but I think the message has been complicated long
before AI slop, from the rise of tablets and social media platforms.
PepperdineG wrote 1 day ago:
My first computer was an Access Matrix that I'd play on at my dad's
office. It was such a neat computer back in the day as a proto-laptop
with built-in modem and printer.
lelanthran wrote 1 day ago:
These books should be rewritten for a modern platform: [1] I spent much
time carefully typing these things in (spy games, horror games, etc),
then even more time designing my own adventure games after reading the
adventure titles.
(HTM) [1]: https://usborne.com/za/books/computer-and-coding-books
regexorcist wrote 1 day ago:
I became the school computer genius by teaching everyone to cheat in
exams with Winpopup. My earliest memories though are also in DOS with
an Olivetti computer.
matchbok3 wrote 1 day ago:
Some of my fondest memories as a young kid was hacking away at an
800mhz machine my dad bought me. Certainly a lot of time was wasted,
but my knowledge of the system was also helped a bit.
Seeing kids nowadays interfacing with just a touch screen makes me
fearful that a foundation of knowledge is not being built, even among
the more nerdy types.
GuB-42 wrote 1 day ago:
> These are expensive machines
Impressive how that part changed. Today, many computers are cheaper
than the desk they are sitting on. Many companies pay over $2000 for
office furniture, and that's not even fancy. A $1000 laptop sits on top
of it.
Furniture made by an actual cabinet maker will easily get to $5000+.
About the price of a maxed out gaming rig, or an enterprise level
workstation.
asdff wrote 18 hours 45 min ago:
Seems like computers have become a sort of ongoing expense though.
They are cheaper at the get, but no one is getting a new desk every 3
years like they might a new laptop. People are probably burning
through laptops for one reason or another way more than they burn
through desks. Company might not ever replace that desk.
The computers companies ditch and you can get on ebay are no slouches
either. Recent gen i5 i7 mini pcs some with 16gb ram already. These
are no slouch cpus. No m series macs but all these companies are
doing are replacing it with a newer i5 or i7 mini pc, and the worker
is often what, opening excel and outlook and teams, same as always.
rhyperior wrote 1 day ago:
I donât know⦠if the top of line PC cost $3000 30 years ago, it
seems like weâre pretty close to that today for class-equivalent
hardware (without going absurd - 32GB of DDR5, game playing video
card, 4TB SSDâ¦)
xboxnolifes wrote 1 day ago:
Inflation adjusted, those particular specs would be much cheaper.
At least prior to recent price changes due to AI demand.
You can definitely go much higher if you really go for TOP of the
line though.
qsera wrote 1 day ago:
One thing that was nice about the graphics programming those days was
that when you drew something on the screen, it remained there until
your program erased it.
This means that you could create cool looking graphics easily. For
example, you can just compute the points of a circle and draw the
points one by one, and in the screen it will show a full circle being
drawn.
"Modern" graphics libs (even SDL I think), made this impossible by
having redraw the whole screen every frame so that now my program has
to remember all the points there the program drew before to get the
same effect.
The former workflow made graphics programming so much fun for me and I
find the modern "fast rendering pipeline" boring and not a lot of fun.
Things like that, one by one, have sucked the whole fun out of
computing.
rhyperior wrote 1 day ago:
Your post just clicked something from of a deep memory into place.
In the early 80s when the IBM PC hit the scene, Hercules had a
graphics card that was amazing and offered better than CGA graphics.
I was plinking on it at my dadâs friendâs house, drawing circles
and stuff, and on HIS computer the graphics were retained. I had to
figure out how to clear the screen, whereas on mine, not having the
Hercules card, it wasnât retained. Never understood what was
happening until now.
PaulDavisThe1st wrote 1 day ago:
Both so-called "retained" and "immediate" mode graphics libraries
continue to exist for most platforms, and you can choose to use
whichever one you prefer.
mike_hock wrote 22 hours 15 min ago:
I mean, you can obviously just draw to your own in-memory
framebuffer that you never erase and then copy that to the physical
backbuffer every frame. But there's no point in doing it that way
when you can easily afford to re-render everything.
Having a limited budget of how much of the screen you can update in
17ms made for fun programming challenges, as did other limitations
of the old hardware. Game developers came up with ingenious ways to
leverage the hardware and make it seem like it could do more than
it actually could.
Scanline-accurate switching of video attributes while wasting no
clock cycles doing everything else and without a timer. That kind
of stuff.
Programming to artificial self-imposed limits is not the same.
qsera wrote 1 day ago:
I have looked it up in the past, and I have looked it up now, but I
cannot find a reliable documentation that describes it.
For example, do you know what combination of flags listed here [1]
would do the trick? Or anything that is not listed there would also
help.
(HTM) [1]: https://documentation.help/SDL/sdlsetvideomode.html
bitwize wrote 1 day ago:
SDL retains everything you've drawn to the screen in backing
store. You need to do an SDL_Flip (1.2) or
SDL_RenderPresent/SDL_UpdateWindowSurface (2.0) to commit what's
in the back buffer to the screen.
PaulDavisThe1st wrote 1 day ago:
AFAIK, SDL does not provide both modes. I don't know which mode
it is designed around.
PhilipRoman wrote 1 day ago:
SDL is a relatively high level API and framebuffer style graphics
work fine on it. I think there are some edge cases for X11 with
non-compositing window manager where you will get interesting
glitches if the window moves.
bitwize wrote 1 day ago:
Historically these weren't "edge cases"; all windowed environments
sent a "redraw yourself" event to a window when it needed to be
shown after having been covered up, that was handled specially by
the application. In X11 this was an Expose event, in Windows this
was called WM_PAINT. If you had a fancy X server back in the day,
you could enable backing store; this kept a framebuffer of the
window contents in memory even if the window itself was covered up
that could be quickly restored upon exposure. This was incredibly
useful and made redraws fast and glitch-free, but back in the days
when RAM was expensive (you know, unlike today...) it could not be
relied on in all X implementations. Compositing WMs have the
equivalent of backing store for all windows, all the time.
Jtsummers wrote 1 day ago:
It's been a while (over a decade now), but I think SDL allows you to
leave the contents on the screen if you don't call the clear function
before you render new content. I don't know how well that'd work with
resizing a window though.
qsera wrote 1 day ago:
I think it works like that if acceleration is no enabled. But even
then I think it does not work reliably..I might be missing
something though.
didgetmaster wrote 1 day ago:
I remember playing Digger on my IBM PC clone sold by AT&T (6300) back
in 1987 or 1988.
I also remember that the game speed was set to some factor of the
computer's clock speed. When I later tried to run the same game after I
upgraded my hardware, the game went so fast, you could not even play
it.
haritha-j wrote 1 day ago:
That's where your PC's turbo button comes in!
empressplay wrote 1 day ago:
I was lucky enough to be an autistic kid in the 1980s with access to a
steady stream of new and novel computers: Apple II, Sinclair,
Commodore, Atari, TI, Macintosh... kept me engaged and off the 'short
bus'. If I had been born ten years earlier I'm certain my life would
have been dramatically different (in a very bad way).
Guestmodinfo wrote 1 day ago:
You seem to be writing about me :)
I also lived a very similar childhood. Class 10 computer science Board
paper I prepared using pen and paper computing only.
The only difference is that I had BASIC, instead of LOGO.
Another difference is that I was not in an industrial town. Since
sometimes you write in your posts about growing up in a small
industrial town. I have a hunch you grew up in Jamshedpur in Jharkhand
state.
echelon wrote 1 day ago:
I remember the titles on the old Apple II machines at elementary
school:
- Oregon Trail
- Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego
- Super Solvers (the best of the lot)
I also got a Windows 95 IBM Aptiva PC from my parents that had a lot of
educational software. I can only remember some of it:
- The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain (I loved this game - it had logic
programming, 3D spatial reasoning tasks, biology, ...)
- Encarta Encyclopedia virtual maze
- Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (I hated it; I learned to type when I got
onto IGN Boards, EZboards, AIM, and IRC.)
- King's Quest VII (this counts as educational logic puzzles, right?)
- MechWarrior II (well, I considered it educational...)
I'm envious of kids today growing up with LLMs and vibe coding. I would
have had a blast at that age with the tools we have today.
nullIsAnObject wrote 9 hours 53 min ago:
2 words: Family Computing. When that magazine showed up and there was
something I could use on my Apple IIe, I would sit there (or kneel,
actually, we had one of those 80s kneeling chair things) endlessly,
even skipping meals or forgetting to go take a leak every once in a
while. I discovered flow state in 5th grade and didn't even realize
it.
I used to skip recess in elementary school to go write code in the
computer lab; the teachers all knew me and would laugh out loud when
I made the computer make a noise... until one day when I programmed
the monophonic speaker to sound like it was polyphonic and out came
the title theme from Terms of Endearment in all of it's 80s glory. I
miss those days.
Man, mavis beacon teaches typing! I wonder if that ever actually did
me any good.
vunderba wrote 1 day ago:
Awesome, you're one of the few people who played nearly the same set
of games I did. My favorite was probably The Island of Dr. Brain,
though all of the Dr. Brain games were great as a kid.
One particularly hilarious part was right at the beginning of Island
of Dr. Brain, back in the old-school days of manual-based copyright
protection. The game would give you longitude and latitude
coordinates, and you had to look them up in the manual to figure out
where you were supposed to parachute. If you got it wrong, your
character would just splash into the ocean.
I actually referenced The Island of Dr. Brain in something I made
about a year ago. I donât know if you played it, but it has a
jigsaw puzzle as one of the mini-games. It was one of the most
unusual jigsaw puzzles Iâd ever seen: an animated jigsaw, where the
entire image was a effectively looping "cinemagraph". One of the
first things LLM-assisted projects I put together was a jigsaw puzzle
game with about a dozen custom animated jigsaw puzzles. Link is in my
profile.
This is a bit of a deep cut, but my most distinct memory of Super
Solvers: Midnight Rescue in DOS was that it used the PC speaker to
play âThe Sorcererâs Apprentice.â If you did anything that
triggered a sound effect like jumping the music would immediately
reset and start over. It was like a weird, primitive version of
scratching a vinyl record as if you were some kind of amateur
PC-speaker DJ. (and kind of the opposite of Dig-Dug)
echelon wrote 12 hours 42 min ago:
I love HN for this.
I'll go digging for your game!
qsera wrote 1 day ago:
As computers grew more powerful, they became less interesting.
There is a lesson in there somewhere that humanity has not yet woken up
to.
bluefirebrand wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know if it's that quite it
I think they became less interesting because they became more
homogenous, more standardized, more commercialized
It's like the internet. It was more interesting when everything was
spread out and you felt like you had to explore it. Now it's all the
same content collected on the same 5 sites, and it feels like there's
nothing actually interesting out there anymore
qsera wrote 1 day ago:
Not sure. Computers where pretty homogenous back then as well.
Every time I find myself infront of a computer, I would do "cd
games", and there would be games...
I think it started becoming less interesting as it grew more
powerful and with it came more capable displays and GUI interface,
and before you know it, computers are indistinguishable from a damn
television.
At least for me as computers started showing more realistic
graphics, it became less abstract, less magical, less interesting.
After all, reality is pretty boring...Not sure how we collectively
missed that fact...
bluefirebrand wrote 1 day ago:
That's fair.
There's probably also an aspect of "The computer used to be a
place you would go, now it's a rectangle that comes everywhere
with you"
It's definitely less magical when it is everywhere and in
everythin
You're not alone in missing the magic though. I miss it too
joarv0249nw wrote 16 hours 39 min ago:
I think part of the magic was that I felt I could get to
understand how the system works on a deeper level. I wonder if
it is now too hard to get to that level of understanding. One
would spend most of the time just scratching the almost
impenetrable surface of todays systems
qsera wrote 10 hours 49 min ago:
Abstract things stimulate the imagination and guide them.
That is why reading a book is a lot more enjoyable than
watching a movie.
When computers started showing reality, that is true color,
high res photos, realistic movies etc, they became less
capable of capturing the imagination.
pelasaco wrote 1 day ago:
Childhood computing for me smells like LOGO programming, King Quest,
Space Quest and Police Quest games.. I loved test drive from Sierra. I
graduated as game developer, because of Sierra. I wanted to work at
nintendo. I ended up writing my firsts exploits in 99, got some fame on
bugtrag and became cyber security expert in the 2000s.. but the only
thing that I wanted, was to do game dev for living.. maybe one day...
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
Similar experience, but I sucked at Logo, as I was my first day with
computer. I aced the 'encrypted' (number->letter substitution) math
puzzle (similar to the Emacs one, M-x mpuzzle), tho.
bsoles wrote 1 day ago:
I had fun times around 1985 with zx81, ZX spectrum, Commodore 64, and
Amiga 500. Creating "games" with sprites and all... Even writing for
loops with print statements were fun.
TrackerFF wrote 1 day ago:
At school we had a bunch of older machines with windows 3.1, which had
some touch typing program installed - it was the only thing we were
allowed to use
Our first family computer was bought back in 1995. IIRC it was a 166
MHz Pentium / 16 MB ram machine with Windows 95. It cost around
$3500-4000 back then, and that's not adjusted for inflation.
EDIT: As a side note, 3 years later I managed to get my hands on a copy
of Half-Life, right after it was launched. Our computer, with
standalone graphics card, was barely able to run the game. Back in
those days, being a gamer and chasing cutting edge graphics was really
expensive.
Prior to this we had a electric typewriter, and the main purpose of the
machine was to be used for writing documents and other business
activities. My first experience with programming, was editing HTML
files. I then went to the library to look for books on programming, and
the only book I could find there (rural nowhere with population 3000)
was a book on Pascal, or possibly Delphi.
I was told that there was this one wiz kid in our small rural town that
as supposed to be "really good with computers", he was a couple of
years old. I hit him up, and the first thing I noticed in his room was
this big "Borland C++" box on his shelf - he showed me a basic 3D
flight simulator clone he was working on, as well as some sort of Doom
clone. I was in awe.
Suffice to say, he did very well during the dot com boom. Skipped
college, and went straight into employment.
A couple of years later, when I started in high-school, some older
semi-retired developer had recently moved to town. He worked with our
school, and offered a Java programming class. Really excellent teacher,
and that was the moment I decided I wanted to work with computers.
steve1977 wrote 1 day ago:
I once discovered where the texts for our touch typing exams were
saved on the network.
Made for some funny exams afterwards...
Edit: well, funny for my adolescent self...
gesis wrote 1 day ago:
We did the opposite.
Once the source texts were found, we changed them all to short
sequences of home row keys.
Everyone began typing at 300+ wpm.
safety1st wrote 1 day ago:
I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck.
The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to
help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most
PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code
for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a
lot of free time could mess around with.
The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded
computer lab and an unusually open minded computer teacher. If you
demonstrated that you were dependable, he'd basically let you do
whatever you want. While my school was mostly a Mac shop, I was a bit
of a Microsoft shill in high school so by graduation I'd figured out
how to stand up and run a Windows NT file & web server for our school
newspaper. Another guy was a Linux nut and had been allowed to do
something similar with RedHat for the school's drafting lab.
Inclination met opportunity, one thing led to another, and I went on
to work with technology for the next 25 years of my life.
What worries me now is that so much technology is so locked down. It
must be a very rare school today that allows the kind of freedom we
had. There is no IDE preinstalled on a phone, and even merely
installing an "unapproved" app is under fire.
If for no other reason, for the sake of the kids the industry, the
tools, the operating systems need to be more open. They need to be
tinkerable. That's how the most motivated kids tend to learn. Our
best and brightest are not being made because we've closed things
down to maximize some hedge fund's ROI somewhere. The
financialization of America was a grave error.
sunshinesnacks wrote 1 day ago:
> What worries me now is that so much technology is so locked down
Raspberry Pi is a nice exception. I know there are other good
examples, but it was the first thing I thought ofâ¦
chadgpt3 wrote 18 hours 50 min ago:
Raspberry Pi has a proprietary boot process and GPU.
c22 wrote 1 day ago:
> ...an unusually open minded computer teacher.
I've heard this story several times before and I, myself, had an
unusually open minded computer teacher as a youth. I'm beginning to
suspect this attribute is is not so unusual amongst computer
teachers as has been assumed.
irishcoffee wrote 13 hours 41 min ago:
I learned absolutely nothing from my AP compSci teacher in
highschool, java was taught at the time, I missed the c++ version
by a year.
He was awful. I learned nothing.
alterom wrote 1 day ago:
>I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck.
>The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s
>The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well
funded computer lab
So, you essentially own your career to your parents being well-off
and tech inclined.
It's not like you ended up in that high school by accident.
Sure, being born in such a family is a stroke of luck that many
people don't get to have.
I did; my mom was a software engineer in the USSR, and I grew up in
the 1990s Ukraine with a PC at home, and went to a great high
school in Odesa, and later, in Brooklyn when we immigrated.
Like @susam, I played Digger on IBM PC 286 as my first game when I
was 4.
I have a PhD in math and Google/Meta/MS on my resume today.
I owe this to many strokes of luck, but how tinkerable the PCs were
was not the most significant one by far.
The most important part was access to production tech, seeing it
used, and having a role model that made it a natural consideration
as a career choice.
And the "luck" of what was available in my K12 was 100% the work of
my parents who got me into those schools.
Credit where credit is due, dude.
safety1st wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
My parents were broke. I grew up on food stamps. Mom worked
retail. Dad had a few good years, his business went bust and we
spent a decade below the poverty line.
It was a public high school in the USA. It was in a rich
neighborhood on the other side of town; our neighborhood was
below median income and had one of the worst high schools in the
state. My parents encouraged me to apply for attendance at the
school across town via a magnet program. I got in and took a
public bus 80 minutes each way for 4 years.
I'm not relating this in order to validate precisely what my
Privilege Index was. Rather to relate how public investment in
resources which were available to anyone who was willing to make
a bit of extra effort transformed at least one kid's life. It
seems these days that public resources go mostly to those with
the most money, or maybe those who were born into the politically
correct group du jour, but almost never to the random kid who
just wants to take a shot at doing something bigger.
I'm glad I was born when I was. Public policy has changed, that
magnet program is now gone, that rich kid school is now for the
rich kids only, and it has gone to the dogs in terms of academic
performance.
alterom wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
>My parents were broke. I grew up on food stamps
I grew up in a communal flat in post-collapse Ukraine with 5
families to 1 toilet, and then on food stamps when we
immigrated to the US. I went to a public high school, and state
colleges.
Your point about public investment in resources which were
available to anyone who was willing to make a bit of extra
effort notwithstanding, many kids from the very same school(s)
didn't do so well, and it was far less about "willing to make a
bit of extra effort".
>Public policy has changed, that magnet program is now gone,
that rich kid school is now for the rich kids only, and it has
gone to the dogs in terms of academic performance.
That, sadly, applies to my high school in Brooklyn too (E.R.
Murrow High School). It's not at all what it used to be.
> It seems these days that public resources go mostly to those
with the most money, or maybe those who were born into the
politically correct group du jour, but almost never to the
random kid who just wants to take a shot at doing something
bigger.
BIGOTRY ALARM BELL
Yeah right. The kids get the resources today because they
belonged to a "politically correct group du jour", unlike you,
who was merely "willing to make a bit of extra effort".
And also, you know, had a personal computer at home in the
1990s, and lived in a neighborhood with a high school mostly
for rich kids.
Uh huh.
>I'm not relating this in order to validate precisely what my
Privilege Index was
That much is clear, which is why I'm pointing your attention to
it.
Describing yourself as "the random kid who just wants to take a
shot at doing something bigger", as opposed to "those who were
born into the politically correct group du jour" was absolutely
uncalled for.
elektronika wrote 1 day ago:
Americans like to downplay the impact of the situation of their
birth in their successes and others' failures.
youngNed wrote 1 day ago:
Ok, just waiting on some Indian lad whose parents didn't work
for ussr state software engineering to chime in, and put this guy
in his place, and i can write my post-post-python class
decontruction.
alterom wrote 22 hours 39 min ago:
>Ok, just waiting on some Indian lad whose parents didn't work
for ussr state software engineering to chime in, and put this
guy in his place, and i can write my post-post-python class
decontruction.
Not sure what you're talking about, and who needs to be put in
their place, and why you'd want an Indian to chime in, but OK.
My point was that when it comes to careet, the parent commentor
owes a lot more to their parents than strokes of luck and how
tinkerable computers were back in the day.
They did attribute their success to luck though, instead of
going for the usual self-made-man myth, so I don't know what
place they need to be put in either.
RiverCrochet wrote 1 day ago:
A silver lining is that Javascript code will run on any modern
browser+OS and can be created with nothing but a text editor. Even
though this is many degrees of abstraction from facing the bare
metal that was there in the 80s and 90s, it's better than nothing.
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
Windows XP (since SP2? )came with a C# compiler and it was pretty
much ignored, CSC.exe.
A bit less with Perl and Python under *nixes where the Idle was
about two clicks away.
With C# you would get far more performance and much better
support.
stavros wrote 1 day ago:
But making tools tinkerable is incompatible with extracting maximal
value from them!
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
I actually had to revisit this sort of thing in a recent design for a
CNC --- for want of a good way to determine the location of a smaller
circle nested into the region between two larger circles, I made a
Circular Array of circles of the desired size, adjusting the number of
them until one lined up as desired: [1] (If someone knows a good/ideal
technique for that, I'd be glad to learn of it --- my math background
is kind of shaky)
(HTM) [1]: https://community.carbide3d.com/uploads/default/original/3X/9/...
sebastiennight wrote 1 day ago:
Let's give it a try.
I'm going to make two assumptions based on your screenshot:
1. The large circles A and B are touching each other
2. You know the radius (a,b,c) of each circle and want the third one
(circle C) to touch both of the first two.
What I'd do is place the center of both circles A and B on the same
horizontal line and choose a frame of reference such that the center
of circle A is the origin, and the center of circle B is placed at
coordinates (a+b, 0)
Now we are looking for the coordinates (x, y) of the center of circle
C, placed above the x-axis. Which by the way is one of two solutions,
as there is a symmetrical circle C' placed below the x-axis, with the
coordinates (x, -y)
We know that if we traced a straight line from the center of C, it
would intersect the x-axis at a 90° angle. So drawing that line
creates two triangles which each have a right angle in this spot:
- one triangle on the left, where the hypothenuse goes from the
center of A (0,0) to the center of C (x,y). Its length is the sum of
the radii of A and C.
- one triangle on the right, where the hypothenuse goes from the
center of B (a+b,0) to the center of C (x,y). Its length is the sum
of the radii of B and C.
Both of these triangles share a vertical segment of length (y).
The left triangle's bottom segment has a length of (x) and the right
triangle's bottom segment has a length of: (a+b) - x
We know from Pythagore that the square of the length of the
hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides of
each triangle, so we know that:
(a+c)^2 = x^2 + y^2
(b+c)^2 = ((a+b) - x)^2 + y^2
So
y^2 = (a+c)^2 - x^2 = (b+c)^2 - ((a+b) - x)^2
(a+c)^2 - x^2 = (b+c)^2 - ((a+b) - x)^2
Develop it all
a^2 + c^2 + 2ac - x^2 = b^2 + c^2 + 2bc - ((a+b)^2 + x^2 - 2ax -
2bx)
Simplify
a^2 + 2ac = b^2 + 2bc - (a^2 + b^2 + 2ab - 2ax - 2bx)
a^2 + 2ac = 2bc - a^2 - 2ab + 2ax + 2bx
2 a^2 + 2ac - 2bc + 2ab = 2ax + 2bx
a^2 + ac + ab - bc
x = ------------------
a+b
and from there you find y, from y^2 = (a+c)^2 - x^2.
I did notice that in your screenshot A and B are of the same size, so
if you knew this from the start it becomes way simpler.
x = a (of course the center of your new circle is at the vertical of
the point where both circles touch, which is obvious due to the
symmetry of the problem)
and
y = squareroot(c^2 + 2ac)
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
Thank you for that!
I am going to make a link to your comment from the forum post in
question: [1] (scroll all the way to the bottom)
and will hopefully be able to translate that into Open(Python)SCAD
code so as to make a generalized solution for my current project:
(HTM) [1]: https://community.carbide3d.com/t/knapp-joint-with-cnc/197...
(HTM) [2]: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
sebastiennight wrote 1 day ago:
Hey you made my day, I can now say that I contributed to a CAD
project. Had never heard of a "knapp joint" before!
OK so your bottom circles are identical, so the y-position of the
center of the top circle is easy as pie.
What does your code need to do?
WillAdams wrote 14 hours 42 min ago:
My pleasure! The Knapp joint is an interesting historical
dead-end in woodworking joinery --- it's interesting to see it
come back.
I will work up a module like to:
def Full_Blind_Box_Joint(self, bx, by, orientation,
side, width, thickness, largeVdiameter, smallDiameter,
normalormirror = "Default", squaretool = 102, smallV = 390,
largeV = 301):
from: [1] (just pushed up that file, but not any other file)
The idea is that a user will be able to specify a joint
dimension and position, then generate a set of DXF files, which
when imported will cut out the design in question once
toolpaths are assigned, no need to go through all the manual
drawing.
The afore-mentioned joint, Full_Blind_Box_Joint is used in: [2]
and variations of it in other box designs at:
(HTM) [1]: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/gc...
(HTM) [2]: https://cutrocket.com/p/63781eaf9822f
(HTM) [3]: https://cutrocket.com/u/WillAdams
sebastiennight wrote 5 hours 23 min ago:
That's really cool, thanks!
Tangential question out of curiosity: I see several designs
mention cost, eg. a "$3 box" and I assume this is just
counting the cost of materials? How much does the
"manufacturing" cost factor in, eg. amortizing the saws and
equipment over all the stuff that you might make out of them?
Ever since I learned the math on swimming pools (which comes
out at something like $400 per swim you'll have in them IIRC)
I've been curious as to how wild the numbers come out to be
on most of our personal projects and how economics can't be
the measure for them. I'm curious if you have some thoughts
on that.
WillAdams wrote 39 min ago:
The $3 Box, back when it was first made was made of 3 $1
cutting boards from the local Dollar Tree (I believe
they're up to $1.25 now).
Additional expenses are of course the machine, tooling,
workholding, electric to run the machine, and one's time,
but for a hobbyist, amortized over a number of projects,
that can be pretty minimal --- if one makes a _lot_ of
projects. YMMV.
k2xl wrote 1 day ago:
I miss those days. Oregon trail was the first game I played on the
computer in 1993 (there was a computer in our Kindergarten class).
Nostalgia for the old web - building websites in HTML on Angelfire and
Expage.com. Learning programming on visual basic and how to copy and
paste to welcome people to the site and to sign the guestbookâ¦
Enivel wrote 1 day ago:
For me it was the view source era. Around 2001 I was copying HTML from
Geocities pages and modifying them in Notepad. I didn't know what a
programming language was but I knew how to change the background color
and add a marquee. That instant feedback loop -- save, alt-tab, refresh
-- was enough to get me hooked.
cube00 wrote 1 day ago:
I never understood why Microsoft didn't have affordable licences to
encourage kids to program.
The school computer lab had Visual Basic but you only got an hour week
in there as part of the computing subject, the school library computers
couldn't have it because the licence was per seat not per site.
You really only had QBASIC which was great but we really wanted to
write Windows apps. You'd be up for a thousand dollars for a MSDN
academic subscription just to get Visual Basic.
I guess the blessing was instead of Windows apps we made web pages and
JavaScript games hosted on our parents ISP webhost accounts while we
dreamed of the day we'd have enough money to buy our own .com domain.
asdff wrote 18 hours 55 min ago:
In my day adults were clueless on tech. Not like there was anyone to
teach programming when they could barely turn on their computer.
Hopefully it's better now in that.
Joel_Mckay wrote 1 day ago:
People forget how locked down the systems were until Borland and
finally GNU gcc entered the market (Unless you went Masm or Pascal.)
I remember the MS visual C++ and VB manuals with compilers were over
$8k/seat at one point (would be almost twice that in today dollars).
People sometimes underestimate how important search engines are to
build applications without official documentation.
Supporting FOSS is more than a convenience for some, as most remember
locked ecosystems were not fun at any age. I remember GW-Basic and
VB3.0 made building programs easy for kids, but it had other issues
besides the license cost. Prior to Visual studio, making standalone
binaries was simply too difficult for most until the Internet.
Now the average AAA game is around 40GiB on Steam, and g++/clang is
the standard tool-suites. Fun times, =3
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
Most people either pirated Visual C/C++ or got GNU/Linux with tons
of devel packages and amateur books (Learn C as if you were a
freshman in College) or something like that.
stephen_g wrote 1 day ago:
I was very lucky that once I'd outgrown QBasic, my father could
get me a copy of Visual Studio 6.0 while it was current, because
he worked at the major University in our state and could access
it through their campus-wide MSDN subscription.
I played with Visual Basic at the start but was keen to learn C++
because I had heard it was used in systems programming (I had the
dream of developing my own operating system). A bit later on I
did stumble on homebrew OS dev and started using DJGPP (a Windows
port of GCC) but having access to Visual C++ was a very important
step!
PaulDavisThe1st wrote 1 day ago:
I started my computing life on BBC Model B machines, which simply
came with BASIC builtin, no license required. It was immediately
apparent to me that there was something odd happening with operating
systems that required you to pay extra to be able to write software.
40 years later, and I've successfully managed to never use a
Microsoft product.
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
They were too busy taking BASIC away from others:
(HTM) [1]: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
KellyCriterion wrote 1 day ago:
...because Sales is busy with bombing schools with CoPilot & MS365
subscriptions and Sales Guys does not have this in their crosshair:
They could create a much bigger and earlier addiction to MS products
if they would enforce coding-for-kids-activities in schools and
colleges :)
Joel_Mckay wrote 1 day ago:
Copilot and MS365 have some API areas that no one outside MS
actually knows what they do.
Day 2 task was cleaning our Win11 Steam game install drive: [1] [2]
(when it works)
Day 1 task installing Win11 Pro in offline-mode without
TPM/Bitlocker speeds up the benchmarks a bit for a game system: [3]
Fun times, but most of the Win experience has always been removing
garbage code/adware/shovel-ware. =3
(HTM) [1]: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
(HTM) [2]: https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI
(HTM) [3]: https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/releases
sonnyproto wrote 1 day ago:
Good old time :)
pixel_popping wrote 1 day ago:
I'll always remember that moment on RPG maker (probably around 9 years
old) where suddenly I've understood Variables (I was experienced with
HTML and so-on prior), a whole world was unlocked, VB6 programs became
possible, everything "clicked" suddenly. I feel once you understand the
fundamentals on how it works, it's easy to progress very fast as a
child/teenager afterward.
With my kid I want to ensure that fundamentals of computing are
understood as early as possible, this is what allows you to understand
how the world is interconnected.
theragra wrote 14 hours 42 min ago:
I remember how I started to make a simple text based game, and
conditionals (in Pascal) were not enough. Ive asked my father, and he
explained that the thing I want is possible with loops.
At this moment, I was given all the tools that allow writing any kind
of program.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
I similarly remember struggling with understanding what "classes"
were in PHP as a kid and why on earth they'd ever be useful for,
seems like needless abstractions, but finally it clicked, and a whole
world opened up, suddenly I could understand much more of Zend Engine
than before, and software engineering became a thing I started caring
about. Of course, later I was enlightened again so now I avoid
classes.
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
Classes where undertood under Inform6 (a literal OOP language
compiling against ZMachine, for text adventures -even more, as
Tetris, Madbomber...) with two lines.
pixel_popping wrote 1 day ago:
I also remember the infamous "OOP" PHP war :)
jeremyjh wrote 1 day ago:
I had many similar experiences, but almost a decade earlier. At grade
school we had Apple 2s with Logo, Oregon Trail and other education
classics. My junior high was a small parochial school that still had
TRS-80s in 1988, along with some apples. My freshman year of high
school was in a well funded district in Chicago suburbs. They had Macs
with Excel and Word - we wrote lab reports in science classes with our
data input and graphed in excel and the graphs pasted into the word doc
reports - in 1990.
kj4211cash wrote 1 day ago:
Love this! You've inspired me to write my own blog post about my early
days with an Amiga (1000?). I wonder how many of us have similar
experiences.
king_geedorah wrote 1 day ago:
It's striking how concise the program in the first video is. Also I had
no idea "Digger" existed. I've only ever known Dig Dug in that style.
raghavchamadiya wrote 1 day ago:
That smell thing is so real. I still get hit with it randomly and I'm
immediately 10 years old again
macNchz wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah that jumped out to me, when I read that line I could instantly
remember the smell of my schoolâs computer lab, like a time warp in
my brain. More than 20 years later I can picture the lab from high
school perfectly, I could draw a little map right now of which
computers were where.
bitwize wrote 1 day ago:
I still remember getting that Pentium as a graduation present, and
my room was suffused with the "new computer smell" for a day or two
afterward. Ah, glorious.
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