Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Wow, that's impressive. Computer education in the 80-90s in the US seems somewhat lacking by comparison. For me 3-5th grade was Oregan Trail, 6-8th was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and 9-12th was typing using the Edit command in Dos and saving to a floppy.



I think it depends on where you were. I was in Minnesota and we had these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC

We had LogoWriter in elementary school. We were programming at a very young age without really knowing that's what we were doing. (We also had this typing software with monsters or something that was easily gamed; it didn't check for errors. So you could type quickly, erase everything you typed, then type it correctly and you'd get something like 350 wpm.)

(I moved to a new district between elementary and middle school.)

In middle school I vaguely recall doing some kind of programming on commodore 64s.

In high school we had a BASIC programming class and also an AP Computer Science class in which we learned a little bit about programming Pascal. Some students did an independent study to learn C, but failed miserably - probably had no real support.

But honestly, I learned the most when I would stay overnight at my cousin's house and hack away at my uncle's computer (PC w/ I think MS-DOS) unsupervised. I broke it a few times, but was always terrified enough to figure out how to fix it. He had a few manuals, and I went through trying all kinds of commands. Figuring out why UNDELETE never worked taught me a bit about how hard disks were used by the OS, stuff like that.


For me, (rural PA, early 1990s) it was exactly that, but we had one teacher who was kind of into computers and they let him run--for grade 12 seniors only---a very, VERY basic programming class consisting of old (for the time) IBM PCs and UCSD Pascal. As the rest of the class was struggling to put the floppy disks in the right way, I spent the first week finishing up all of the year's worth of assignments so I could use the rest of the year to screw around and try to make games, write joke programs to mess with fellow students, etc. Fun class, got me excited about structured programming languages as opposed to BASIC, but pretty inadequate if your goal was to prepare future software engineers.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: