1980s: Learning To Code Back in the '80s!

Modern devs would not survive one cassette tape load error.

8:29 - "Software is electricity being bossed around by numbers." Love that.

Age verification back in those days was, "Don't lick the mains plug."

This video could've easily been about my childhood, except I grew up in the swamps of Louisiana instead of the frozen prairie of Saskatchewan. Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Dave!

I started with C64 assembly language in the 80s. It was really fun!

Thank you. Absolutely nailed it.

Oh so true. And the magazines more often than not a month later printed the fixes in the code that they had in the months before magazine. And the debugging print”if you see this something went wrong”. Thanks for the video

First computer was a Commodore PET 16 in 1978. Everyone in our neighborhood had different PCs. It was glorious! We were all curious about each other's systems and shared knowledge freely. We were all literal reverse engineers before we became programmers. All of us had a version of basic. Such great times!!

You made me nostalgic, for an instant Iwas in my kid room trying to write a puzzle game with sprite

This is a fantastic essay and I'll be sharing it with every tech educator I know.

lol i remember running up a $2000 dollar phone bill dialing up the long distance server that was across the road, the ass chewing i still remember well. was totally worth it though.

I learned to program (Fortran) in the 1960s when I was 14. So there were no microprocessors, just mainframes. At high school, progming was typing your program onto paper tape. Once a week, everyone's tapes would be mailed to London, ICL would run the programs and the line-printer printouts would be mailed back. I only to to use an interactive terminal (at 110 baud,; 300 would have been luxury) when I got to university. Eventually I got a PhD in computer science. Definitely programmming got faster and debugging easier by the 1980s.

BASIC wasn't just a programming language in the '80s. It was a way of life, and every kid had to learn it just to get by. When I was in the third grade, I used PR#1 & a GOTO loop to hijack the dot matrix printer in the Apple II lab. My poor teacher took 20 minutes (and help from two other teachers) to finally figure out that it was ME rather than "something wrong with the printer." "Principal's office NOW, young man!" 😂

Brings back memories (I am 64)....

TL;DR: You subconsciously learned something that no vibe-coder ever will. And that's wonderful.

I started writing BASIC on an Acorn Electron. I had to go to the library to get a copy of a magazine called The Micro User. The 1980s was the golden era of computing... IMO.

“Dribbles bytes through a straw…” Love it! 😂😂😊

Thank you. This took me back to my TRS-80 Model 1. Mine had Level II basic, but needed several trips to Radio Shack for hardware modifications which were usually soldered jumpers. I had the pregnant expansion interface cable (buffer), installed my own RAM upgrades, modified floppy drive cables to add drives, etc. The joy was programming...especially post cassette days...but hardware knowledge was still required in the 1970's and 80's. I miss some (not all) of that, but you are 100% correct that I still ask "WHY?" which is a major driver as I code today...which is less often than I might like, but will probably receive more of my time after I retire.

I remember when I was a little kid we were too poor to own carpet let alone a computer. My dad got me a programming book when I was in grade school and I had never even touched a computer and I learned to program before I even learned to touch a computer! When I was in like grade 7 my parents took me to a computer program in class for adults in town and I actually knew how to do it all! I had never touched a computer before then!

I grew up in the mountains of Papua New Guinea, and this describes my introduction....