It wasn't in the Netherlands. A graphical calculator was required for math and many kids learned at least some programming by creating their own little programs to cheat in tests. Also, you could get code for games and then program them. The newer ones with USB cables made adding games much easier though.
The word you're looking for is "serial port."
Neopets allowed "pet pages" containing HTML when I was 10 years old, and this was my first foray into programming.
There's this huge tribal knowledge built up around copy-paste CSS hacks to enable things like tab navigation all on one page with no JS. It's actually pretty wild some of the stuff these folks do, especially since almost none of them have any technical knowledge and it's all trial-and-error and sharing what works through the forums.
The amount of hackery they do for their forum guild pages (hosted as pet pages) and such almost blows my mind more than the fact that Neopets is still around and somewhat active after all these years.
It is not just tinkering, these devices are made for you to consume, not to produce. Which is a great shame as they are natural creative platforms, we just need somehow to break the chains and liberate them, both phones and tablets.
Creating seems to have fallen by the day wide compared to mindless consuming, interaction and feeding content to social aggregation companies who sell users attention to advertisers.
As dreary as this topic is, it's kind of nice to see a healthy exploration about more than the one current way of using tech.
Constraint drives creativity.
Early web development had the same principles...you could only expect the user to wait so long for a page load on a dialup connection before you lost their attention, so the goal was to make each and every one worth the wait.
Text display addressable by row/column... something like 8x24 if memory serves?
No mucking about with event loops, window handlers, setup functions...
ticalc.org was great too. Build your own serial transfer cable... Build external storage..
I'd code in the car, at the grocery store, at family gatherings, while my parents discussed serious business (taxes, attorneys, etc), while sitting in waiting rooms, during boring classes at school (because school catered to the lowest common denominator and teachers would have to re-explain things about fifty times) etc and I would spend about half of the time on my calculator and the other half on my Game Boy. Fairly often I'd just leave the Game Boy at home.
We also had a computer at home since I was 7, and I spent as much time as I could get away with on there (mostly writing and working on my personal website). But when that wasn't available, or my parents felt like limiting my screen time, back to coding on the calculator I'd go.
I still did plenty of other normal things, I didn't exclusively do this, but I did spend a lot of time on it, and I got into a Maker mindset when I was really young that still carries over to this day.
The limitations on the calculator seemed to be a big driving factor in my interest at the time. The drive to push it beyond its intended purpose. With smartphones...you don't really have that because apps already exist for nearly everything.
If "but they're not you" (what they? there is no they in that comment) is such a great argument that it absolutely needs a response, "you're not the person you're talking to, stop trying to influence them, they're not you" is a sufficient one. Your own medicine, take it first.
Parents need to learn to back off. It's the one thing this generation of parents (Gen X and older millenials) seem to not have gotten. You can't force your children to be you or to be a version of you who didn't make the mistakes you did.
What I'm about to say might be a little bit too much of internet psychoanalysis, but I see it too often all over the internet as well as from people I know in real life, and I feel like this is a general trend because of that. So, this needs to be said somewhere for the chances at least one person will see it: this sort of thinking in my opinion stems from the parent putting too much of their own sense of self in a child. Specifically, seeing a child as either an extension of their being, and even a "second chance" to do things right from the beginning. The success of a kid or their failure is essentially the parents' since said kid is an extension of themselves. This can lead to the child becoming an instrument of the parents' self-validation.
While a lot of this may be intended with the kindest of intentions, it is unintentionally extremely selfish, and it gets parenting backwards. A child isn't you, and they aren't a chance to fix yourself; they are their own person, and they have an existence apart from you and deserve respect apart from you. The point of parenting isn't to have a smaller version of yourself, it is to cultivate an individual who has their own self-agency and own right to self-determination. Of course, in this process, that person will no doubt emulate many parts of you...but that process will be natural. It should not be the focus of your parenting and it shouldn't be forced.
Once a parent realizes this, then a lot of these things that keep them up at night won't turn out to be as terrible as they seem, mobiles, drugs, bad boyfriends/girlfriends, art school, you name it. Sure, you want to take care of your child, make sure they sleep, eat, get a great education, and may be not do too many drugs. But the person I was replying to was fretting that, god forbid, a child be more distracted by a phone like x or y person they know was distracted by games, and not become z person they should be. It's so ironic, because so many distractions have existed for decades, but you've turned out fine. Why not let your child discover for themselves what turns them on, despite the distractions and all? Why do you know who they should be? (hint: it might have a lot to do with who you should be (or are), not what the kid should be).
The entire thing about play is that it is play and adults aren't there to supervise. Parents need to learn their place and let kids fail a little and get hurt a little bit. It's part of growing up. And for the parents, understanding this will hopefully get them to realize you won't "fix yourself" by "fixing" your kids instead of looking inward.
But that's the thing, they weren't. I can't find that upstream in this thread. But I'm happy to hold that position.
> It's so ironic, because so many distractions have existed for decades, but you've turned out fine.
I'm not convinced that many people actually did. Right now, it's getting more and more absurd, more and more shallow and violent, and climate and pollution nobody really feels responsible for. The branch we evolved on is being cut off, and we suffer from bystander paralysis. But we're fine because we can actually sleep well in this pathological mess? How sure are we that the people who act out in silly or destructive ways are not more sane still than those who don't even do that? Personally I'm not sure at all.
> Why not let your child discover for themselves what turns them on, despite the distractions and all?
Because they're not by themselves, we're not talking about kids finding mobile devices in the woods. It's kinda saying let the kid deal with the onslaught of machines and algorithms made by all adults except their actual parents, as if the whole world only wants their best, while the parents just selfishly want to have a second chance at their regrets and so on.
I super duper disagree. I don't disagree with your point in a vacuum (Franz Kafka expressed similar thoughts in letters to Elli Hermann), but in this context I do. Like when someone says "too much sugar is harmful" and someone else talks about how we shouldn't expect others to conform to our ideals of beauty. Yeah, it's technically correct, but in context it smells, because it's not addressing the actual point made in the least, and is making assumptions about people you don't know the first thing about.
If a kid gets hooked to ElsaGate videos ( https://i.imgur.com/AlTHFn5.jpg ), who am I to say they're wrong? Someone paying attention. If 99.99% of the people on the planet said "it's fine" that wouldn't make it fine, it would put 99.99% of the people on the planet my personal trash heap. When I was a child, I didn't hold back with my opinion, so why would I do that as an adult? I haven't even found ONE serious adult who can actually take in ElsaGate (the linked image is a joke, a tiny crop of a still frame of a trailer, but even that's too much already). And that's just a derpy bumbling first step, this shit will evolve and iterate. But oh yeah, let's mock "think of the kids". This is cavemen playing with nuclear bombs, bragging.
There's being hurt a little bit, and there's being swallowed whole, and the thing about getting swallowed whole is that you don't live to get hurt a little bit another day.
Yes, the TI had this. I would spend 30 minutes drawing a dragon image and saving it, then loading it in my choose your own adventure text game, without breaking a sweat, changing things and iterating quickly while sitting through an algebra class where I knew everything that was taught instantly (because I already used it in code) where all the other kids needed the rest of the class plus more to understand.
I would use the greek alphabet as makeshift sprites, the letter "O" as a ball and the equals sign "=" as bricks in an alleyway clone, etc. I'm not saying kids should still be expected to do this. There should be newer and better tools, focused on that creation.
Have a look at Pythonista for a full Python environment, or Coda for a web dev environment. There's also all the web-based tools, hopefully some are optimised for smaller screens. On iPad you have Playgrounds to run all sorts of Swift code. For kids, there's other simple environments in apps like Scratch.
So as you might imagine, I disagree with your statement that "'smartphones' nowadays makes it difficult for you to create on them", and think that's just a case of nostalgia on your behalf.
But 'smartphones' nowadays makes it difficult for you to create on them, especially program code that you can run on the device. I might not have gotten such an early understanding of how to program if I didn't have a programmable device in my pocket to take with me everywhere and play with.
I wouldn't have such a problem with smartphones if it was a fun toy to make things with. Even now, the only thing I ever really 'make' on the device are some notes that I then use on 'real' devices later.