I think the limitations are not main reason why these 8-bit computers produced many good programmers. It's the fact that they booted straight to BASIC. In many cases, that was all you had. That invited people to start experimenting.

My parents were also poor, I learned BASIC without having access to a computer except for one hour a week at school, I didn't have my own computer until many years later, I was fixing other people's computers to earn money to get components for my computer, I didn't have access to internet until around 2000, so I was learning from outdated books. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I didn't have those limitations.

Anyway, Raspberry Pi is definitely the closest thing to the experience now. You boot up the default image and you have access to a lot of programming tools. You even get to peek/poke memory to access the GPIO pins, but you have to do it as root these days. :)

"I think the limitations are not main reason why these 8-bit computers produced many good programmers. It's the fact that they booted straight to BASIC. In many cases, that was all you had. That invited people to start experimenting."

More than half the kids I knew who had computers growing up just used them to play games - there was no experimenting with BASIC or anything else. It was a games console with a keyboard - that was it.

OF those who did program, I think many were forced in to getting 'better' because of the limitations. You generally couldn't say "just add another meg of ram to run this" - there really was only one configuration in many cases - you had to think of interesting ways to compact more info in to a program (compression, page out to disk, etc).

Yes, having a programming environment as the first thing you're greeted with probably did get many people involved, but the limitations also produced a mindset amongst many devs of learning how to do more with less.

I like your hypothesis. Maybe I'll campaign to get BASIC material on Khan Academy ;)

Only semi-kidding.

We're developing a BASIC interpreter called retRUNner that's (initially) Applesoft compatible, but will have modern graphics and sound capabilities so users (kids, mostly) will be able to play games like Woz's original Breakout (we have a collection of over 400 listings we'll be shipping with it) and upgrade them to 3D, add art, music, sound effects and so on.

So we're teaching a bit of history along with some coding skills. Down the road we're going to add additional 'dialects' such as Apple LOGO, and Atari, Sinclair and Commodore BASICs, but the Apple II version will be out soon -- I'll be sure to mention it on here when we release it =)

for bonus points support all the same PEEKs and POKEs and CALLs that Applesoft BASIC did on the II series. even if it's not strictly part of the BASIC itself, but the integration between it and the hardware/BIOS, it would be nice. technically might be required to correctly run lots of the BASIC programs from that era. I know most of my own relied on them for certain effects.

So cool! Happy to give you early feedback if you so wish. Best of luck with the project.

I like this.

Why not. This is pretty much my game plan if/when I have kids: Start them off with a raspberry pi or similar, a keyboard and a monitor, then gradually explore with them and add more gizmos and software together. Some of my fondest memories as a child was playing around on my father's old IBM mainframe workstation computer with two 5 1/5 inch floppies as a three to five year old. At that age I really didn't need much, seeing something happen on a screen after some keypresses and some analog sounds coming from the floppy drive was enough magic for me. I'm thinking that giving a child an iPad at that age could be really damaging - there's just no sense of wonder and accomplishment outside the prepared paths anymore.

I'm doing pretty much that right now with my 5-year-old daughter with a raspberry pi. She can currently boot it up and check her email by herself (using claws-mail). One of the big things that I think we can do today that wasn't really available when I was a kid is robotics. For a couple hundred bucks and some time invested, you can make a robot platform for them to play with and get them playing with super low-level stuff without any kind of pretense (limiting her to just the r-pi with a BASIC repl would be pretty artificial in today's world, but the state of hobby robotics now is much like the state of computing was 25 years ago). I'm working on a robot repl right now so that she can get the instant feedback like we had with BASIC, but it's slow going for lack of time.

The thing I've found interesting is how she goes back and forth between the r-pi and the iPhone pretty seamlessly. I don't think she realizes that they're fundamentally similar devices. To her the iPhone is just a black box with some fun games on it, but the r-pi is a lot more like an adventure.

This is amazing what you're doing for her. I wish someone did something like that for me but as a girl I was usually discouraged from pursuing science, computers, physics or anything like that. I am sure she will appreciate it all when she's older.

That doesn't add up to me. The children of today will almost surely look back at the iPad the same way you look back at your dad's IBM mainframe and with the same nostalgia as others on this thread. It'll seem quite primitive compared to the contemporary technology of their adulthood.

Here's the big difference: You can't 'play' around with them the same way, they're not built to program on or change / break things significantly. It's not an empowering device.

I bought a kano/raspberry kit for my 5yr old. We explore the terminal, python interpreter, minecraft etc and he is totally pumped, with the ipad lying idly just by his side. What really clicked for him was the fact that he now had a real computer that did stuff like dad's and calls himself a 'real hacker'.

I still see tight hardware constraints now. Until '10 I was working at a company that made flash CF cards which used 8-bit processors. 32K of SRAM and 64K of code space with bank switching. Every clock cycled mattered. Hand coded division operations. 32-bit integers are a luxury. Even wrote some self modifying code for an inner loop that boosted performance by 25%. Nowadays that company is using ARM processors but you still hit constraints (usually memory) not seen on PCs and servers.

as I've gotten older I've increasingly wondered if I should make the jump (back, technically) to low-level programming. working on those highly constrained devices, every cycle matters, every bit, every watt, etc. because that's where I started as a kid and think it would give me a market advantage over the younger generation who've grown up with supercomputers in their pockets, a dozen high-level languages to choose from, frameworks for everything, tutorials and videos for everything, and not really having to worry about performance or resource usage like "we" used to have to do just to make anything work at all.

Yeah low-level programming was why I have been working on firmware for a long time. But working on truly resource constrained systems can get old. Instead of really solving the problem at hand, you have to work on quirks and idiosyncrasies. I'm glad that we are now working on 32-bit processors.

> Instead of really solving the problem at hand, you have to work on quirks and idiosyncrasies.

FWIW, I work in Big Data and feel the same way :)

A lot of kids probably get started programming with TI-BASIC on their TI83s/84s or whatever they have these days.

I think today's microcontroller are more similar at spec level. So programming Arduino-like is a maybe today's equivalent.

Hum, maybe I'm stretching a bit here.