Thread

1. meredithbloom · 1790380747 · focus · HN ↗

   > "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.

   1. saadn92 · 1790389295 · focus · HN ↗

      I'm not even that old, but totally agree with this sentiment. Going to miss those times. It's amazing being able to build whatever you want now, but it's bittersweet because if you truly wanted to learn how to do it, you could do it yourself.

      1. AbsurdCensor · 1790390981 · focus · HN ↗

         I don't understand this. Back in the early days of the internet, you absolutely couldn't learn 'how to do it' without finding obscure books or knowing someone. Now though? You can learn all of it, and find the resources almost instantly. Want to build a computer, self host, program, you have millions of resources at your hand.

         1. qsera · 1790392366 · focus · HN ↗

            >you absolutely couldn't learn 'how to do it' without finding obscure books...

            QBasic's bultin help/documentation was good enough for me..

            1. josephg · 1790431927 · focus · HN ↗

               Me too! Though I never learned how to use functions (subroutines) until I picked up C from a book later on. I still have dozens of programs I wrote back in the day in qbasic, largely based off the examples in the help system.
            2. vunderba · 1790435094 · focus · HN ↗

               Agreed! What’s this weird `SCREEN` command? Punch F1 and you get a complete breakdown of all the screen modes, color palettes, and their resolutions.

               As I mentioned in another comment, I think if you didn’t grow up with it, you just underestimate how amazing QBASIC was as an IDE, a programming language, and perhaps most importantly as an educational tool. I mean, it even came with actual BASIC programs (GORILLA, NIBBLES, etc) right there that you could use to explore and tweak the values as you learned.

               There’s no better way to learn how something works than to physically play with the actual values, change constants, change variables, and observe how that affects the behavior of the game.

               1. qsera · 1790444437 · focus · HN ↗

                  > you get a complete breakdown of all the screen modes, color palettes, and their resolutions.

                  If I remember correctly, there were even sample programs included in this documentation.

                  1. vunderba · 1790445212 · focus · HN ↗

                     Yes! To my knowledge, I think almost every single keyword in the built-in help had a small example program at the bottom that you could type in.

                     For example GET/PUT had this one:

                       SCREEN 1
                       DIM Box%(1 TO 200)
                       x1% = 0: x2% = 10: y1% = 0: y2% = 10
                       LINE (x1%, y1%)-(x2%, y2%), 2, BF
                       GET (x1%, y1%)-(x2%, y2%), Box%
                       DO
                           PUT (x1%, y1%), Box%, XOR
                           x1% = RND * 300
                           y1% = RND * 180
                           PUT (x1%, y1%), Box%
                       LOOP WHILE INKEY$ = ""

         2. dosisking · 1790394332 · focus · HN ↗

            Back in the early days of the internet, there were FAQs written about everything. You could talk to people who actually knew what they were doing, as opposed to today.
         3. saadn92 · 1790395638 · focus · HN ↗

            Things that are easy to do don't necessarily mean that's the right way to do it. Grueling work sometimes helped you learn far more than just getting the answer to something easy.
         4. josephg · 1790431834 · focus · HN ↗

            There were a lot of books written back then on programming. My local book shops had a section dedicated to computer programming - including all the popular programming languages of the day like C, C++, Basic (and eventually Visual Basic), Java and so on. The books were technical and specific, but they were incredibly easy to find. And back in those days book shops were everywhere.

            I learned C, Java, JavaScript and Obj-C from books over the years. Those books were honestly much better resources for a beginner programmer than most online resources are today.

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