> "But it booted straight into BASIC. That’s all it did. I was, like, 8 years old. I wasn’t about to learn BASIC. What I learned instead: computers were not as awesome as I’d imagined."
You were the exception. Most kids felt awe. We started learning BASIC and creating "dumb games". That's the origin story of most people my age who ended up in this doomed industry.
I think you were the exception. Most kids never even knew what BASIC was. If there was a game already on the computer, they'd be happy to play it. If they really liked the game they might learn how to start the game if it wasn't already running, but they didn't care about doing anything else. Kids who were into computers looked at a computer and saw endless possibility. Everybody else played sports outside, watched TV, or hung out with their friends.
It was probably a function of not just personality type but education. For whatever reason I was taught basic in elementary school as a millennial and it left an impression.
Education has to help demystify computers and give people an idea of what they could do with one. Basic seems like a weird choice for a millennial, but at least it had you actually write code instead of abstracting it away into pushing around icons like some of the systems I've seen for teaching young kids about software or even just giving directions to turtles.
Why is BASIC a weird choice? It wasn't really a choice at all. All the computers in my school ran it until I was 8 or 9 and the school board could afford to upgrade to Windows machines.
Depending on where you draw the line for millennials the school computers could have been running anything from Windows 95 to Windows XP. BASIC wouldn't have been included in XP or 2000, and depending on what exactly they were using, it may have been easier to use something with more features. QBasic for example wouldn't have syntax highlighting. Simple programs in languages like python or perl can be used to teach the same concepts, with fairly similar syntax, and would have been more applicable to software people were actually writing at the time.
I don't have much experience with Visual BASIC, but it seems like it was (and still is) a fairly effective and usable rapid development environment.
These days I'd rather program in F# or C# if I'm writing code to run on the CLR, but I remember it as pretty nice for making GUIs especially.
> Depending on where you draw the line for millennials the school computers could have been running anything from Windows 95 to Windows XP.
Weird. I distinctly remember Commodore 64, DOS, and Windows 3.1 at school. Kind of hard to use Windows 95 before 1995, but I am pretty sure I had a Windows 98 SE machine at home when my school finally got Windows 95.
If you define a millennial as someone born from 1982-1996, the majority of those kids by the time the had a computer lab (say by the time they were in middle school) would have been too old for BASIC. You are talking 92-06, Windows 95 took over the majority market share by the end of '96, and you are forgetting a whole lot of schools had Apples being pumped in, so a lot less access to BASIC. Unless you were in a programming adjacent class, the majority of millennials weren't learning basic. Ask your non tech millenials how much BASIC they learned and they would look at you like you grew an extra arm.
> Ask your non tech millenials how much BASIC they learned and they would look at you like you grew an extra arm.
Yes, but they would say the same about any other programming language too.
BASIC was common on the Apple ][ series, and in the Win95 era QBasic was popular.
It was not impossible to have access to computers in the educational environment (either in class or as an extracurricular) before middle school, either.
meredithbloom · · focus · HN ↗
You were the exception. Most kids felt awe. We started learning BASIC and creating "dumb games". That's the origin story of most people my age who ended up in this doomed industry.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
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isityettime · · focus · HN ↗
wild_egg · · focus · HN ↗
Weird. I distinctly remember Commodore 64, DOS, and Windows 3.1 at school. Kind of hard to use Windows 95 before 1995, but I am pretty sure I had a Windows 98 SE machine at home when my school finally got Windows 95.
AbsurdCensor · · focus · HN ↗
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zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, but they would say the same about any other programming language too.
BASIC was common on the Apple ][ series, and in the Win95 era QBasic was popular.
It was not impossible to have access to computers in the educational environment (either in class or as an extracurricular) before middle school, either.
musicale · · focus · HN ↗