I got mine from the free disks and CDs on the front of magazines in the UK. They were under a non-commercial license, but that’s all you need when you are learning.
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In the early 70s my parents played squash at night at a local court. My brother and I just ran riot through the building while our parents were busy but in the waiting room there was a Pong game. It cost 20c to play so of course that would never happen but it had a demo mode which ran all the time, much like your graphic. Best entertainment ever.
Later I had a superboard II, and we had Apples (and Oranges) at high school, but I never saw Woz’s colour trick because we weren’t using NTSC TVs.
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Interestingly, US Patent No. 4,136,359, titled “Microcomputer For Use with Video Display” was filed on April 11, 1977 with Steve Wozniak as sole inventor. I pinged Al Alcorn about this and he said “Steve went way beyond what I described to him in developing the high res color system.” This is typical of Woz’s creativity, which is also shown by the design of the Apple II’s floppy controller. The floppy upgrade in 1978 added hugely to the Apple II’s success, particularly since Woz simplified its controller from about 47 ICs to six ICs aided by special software that was included in the Apple DOS os.
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It works on a composite color monitor too…
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Not quite sure what hardware we had at high school. We definitely had monitors, rather than TVs, but I don’t recall them having color. Its possible the monitors were monochrome, even if the graphics hardware and software supported some color.
JavaScript was intended in part to be a modern BASIC (as in accessible to pretty much anyone), and while that didn’t exactly work out (it because too important to stay even vaguely simple) modern “scripting” languages can serve the same role BASIC once did.
The RPi kind of comes at “recreating the programmer pit dish that was the late 1970s early 80s” by giving you a system with a lot of rough edges that you get to deal with, and being inexpensive enough that someone would buy one for a school child (or a school child could afford on their own if they were determined…remember it isn’t just the $35, they probably need a keyboard, mouse, power supply, and might not be able to take the family TV over, so maybe needs a small TV too…this could run $75 to $250)
…and if any of this makes you think I’m down on the RPi, I’m not. I think it is a pretty awesome bit of hardware for the price, and does let kids get into programming/electronics if they actually have the interest in a way that say owning a far more expensive Mac never would.
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My son’s high school computing class was teaching in JS. They used brackets as their editing environment, and tested their code on a local browser with a stub html file. The students seemed to take to it quite well.
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Cool. I mean I may or may not be wrong in general, but I’m happy to be wrong if it means people are getting a shot to decide if programming is a good thing for them.
JS is nice and immediate, and I’ve always thought that was a big plus for one’s first language.
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Growing up in PAL-land, me neither.
I do remember Pong machines in cafés and sports clubs and whatnot. And yes, demo modes… being five or six it was easy to pretend one was actually playing on the machine.
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Hardware at school: one Apple ][ with two floppy drives and regulation green monochrome monitor. Not part of the regular curriculum, you had to sign up for an after-hours project group led by one of the math teachers to get near it. So maybe 15 boys taking turns “programming”, i.e. typing out the code the teacher had us developing on paper. And it was always some sort of math thing that you could have done just as well on a programmabie calculator.
Still, I did learn something and you got to swap tips and software - sooner or later everybody in the group has their own breadbox at home. Mostly C64s, with the odd VC-20 or Sinclair thrown in.
Plus that one weird guy who got himself a TI99, but of course the model without enough memory to actually do anything useful or interesting with it. IIRC, his planned career path was to get a MBA and maybe enter politics, he already was a member of our conservative party’s youth club.
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I just want to give a shout-out to how in the “olden days”, the companies didn’t really seem to care about engineers from different companies sharing techniques, mostly because their sights were set elsewhere. It is kind of amazing nowadays to think that Woz was able to help his buddy Jobs over at Atari and that his nominal employer, HP, didn’t reprimand him (as far as we knew). And that Atari engineers would still trade hacks with Woz and Jobs over at this new company called Apple.
To some degree, there still is this loyalty to other geeks over loyalty to employers, we just aren’t as open about it.
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At the time, people had little need/use for home computers, so including BASIC was a selling point, giving them something to do out of the box.
And putting it in ROM meant you didn’t need to load it from cassette, or add a floppy drive to load it from there.
But I got my first floppy drive in 1984 and my first hard drive in 1993. So it’s been a long time since I coukdn’t easily run BASIC when it wasn’tin ROM.
I first tried C in 1988, and it was awful, a 2 MHz clock for the CPU and two 360K flopoy drives, I soon gave up. Even a simole program caused endless error messages (because I was just startuping) and it was too much work and time.
But a few years ago I wrote a really simple program in C, more a utility. I could compile it in an instant, not really different from running a few lines of BASIC in an interpreter.
Small computers were barely a thing in high school. But, therewas a Teletype machine connected to the schoolboard’s mainframe, and some program connected to it, under the math department.
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My elementary school was similarly limited. One full C64 kit with floppy drive, monitor, and printer for the whole school. They had it on a wheeled desk and it rotated between classes for 1 week intervals where you could use it during recesses and lunch.
The only other computer in the school was a PET owned personally by the science teacher that he kept in his classroom voluntarily and used it to write programs to demonstrate scientific concepts taught in his class.
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We brought color to an ASR-33 teletype by using a red/black typewriter ribbon.
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and we were happy to have it, dammit! But the sweet solution for mechanical ASCII i/o was the model 35, which everyone calls the model 28 'cause that’s what the more common baudot version was called.
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mmm Borland. I had Turbo Basic, Pascal, C. Think they had a COBOL too, but I didn’t want that because it was a dead language (yeah…) The output was pretty much the same regardless of front end, I think. I used the basic a lot because I worked on projects with a friend who had a basic compiler for Amiga that was similar enough use the same files. There was a way (forget how) to compile programs without the debug code the basic .EXE files always had in them; made them run much faster
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I was lucky that my school had a lab full off Apple ][e stations. We learned to program in Logo and then Apple Basic.
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With a bit of hackery, here’s a Model 15 as a Linux terminal:
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That a Curious Marc effort? I’ve used model 15’s as well; not for computer terminals, just offline tape cutting. Including one that didn’t have a printer on it, just a linear dial with a pointer that showed how many characters since the last . If you wanted to know if you made an error, read the code off the tape. That machine you could type very fast on…those days I could do about 120 wpm and it would keep up. IBM Keypunch (029 I think) also had great keyboards
