> "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.
Your priors are all out of whack. Most people never learned BASIC, let alone at 8. Programming is much more accessible now than then, but the overwhelming majority of people still don’t know any JavaScript or python or anything else.
Programming (by humans) is less accessible in 2026 because most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment and they don't include a user-friendly programming instruction manual (graphing calculators may be an exception however). And before the era of "there's an app for that" it was assumed that users would need to write their own programs, so systems were designed to support that. Vibe programming (by LLMs) is more accessible now however.
BASIC was designed as a simplified, interactive version of FORTRAN that non-experts could learn in an afternoon, but which was still powerful enough for a wide range of applications including numerical methods, simulations, data processing, and games. It was also small enough to implement effectively on a timeshared minicomputer or an 8-bit microcomputer.
Even though the Mac was GUI-based, for a time it shipped with, and promoted, HyperCard, which led to a brief explosion of user-created programs developed as HyperCard stacks.
Have you ever been diagnosed with ADD or autism? I don't expect you to answer back on that. People that have these characteristics tend to cluster in fields like tech. This means without any prior knowledge you self filtered to a set of actions you didn't know you had a much higher attraction to than a random sample of the population.
In addition this also increases the probability that your unaware of others peoples drives, likes, and abilities, which can easily mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information.
> mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information
It's worth considering that BASIC was invented to teach programming to incoming college students, most of whom had never used computers before, and most of whom would major in the humanities or social sciences. As I understand it, it became part of the required first-year math curriculum, meaning basically (pun intended) every student learned how to write simple programs in BASIC.
You are correct in the sense that it was originally Ivy League students (and some local high school students), a highly select group, but it shows that BASIC wasn't harder than first-year college math in the 1960s. Over the subsequent decades it turned out that a lot of elementary school students could learn it as well.
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.
thfuran · · focus · HN ↗
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
BASIC was designed as a simplified, interactive version of FORTRAN that non-experts could learn in an afternoon, but which was still powerful enough for a wide range of applications including numerical methods, simulations, data processing, and games. It was also small enough to implement effectively on a timeshared minicomputer or an 8-bit microcomputer.
Even though the Mac was GUI-based, for a time it shipped with, and promoted, HyperCard, which led to a brief explosion of user-created programs developed as HyperCard stacks.
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
In addition this also increases the probability that your unaware of others peoples drives, likes, and abilities, which can easily mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information.
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
It's worth considering that BASIC was invented to teach programming to incoming college students, most of whom had never used computers before, and most of whom would major in the humanities or social sciences. As I understand it, it became part of the required first-year math curriculum, meaning basically (pun intended) every student learned how to write simple programs in BASIC.
You are correct in the sense that it was originally Ivy League students (and some local high school students), a highly select group, but it shows that BASIC wasn't harder than first-year college math in the 1960s. Over the subsequent decades it turned out that a lot of elementary school students could learn it as well.