The year was 1986, and I was on my first Disney World trip. After a couple of days of traveling up and down Florida visiting the various theme parks, my parents decided to stop at a local electronics shop.
Now, back at home we didn't have many fancy electronics stores, so this huge emporium of transistors was pretty amazing for all of us.
My mother hinted that they were going to buy us a Nintendo (NES), and I was ecstatic. I had never heard of such thing, but seeing Super Mario Bros. on the display machine was pretty mind blowing for an eight year old.
But, my oldest brother (who was a bigger nerd than me) did not want the NES. Crap. I was furious, and really disappointed.
Instead, he wanted some stupid computer. It was big, bulky, ugly (light brown with black function keys!), and required a huge monitor to be of any use. It also required a disk drive (a 1541 model).
Yes, my brother wanted a Commodore C64.
So, my parents decided against the NES (oh the humanity!), and purchased the C64 with a 13-inch (I think) color monitor, a 1541 disk drive, and a color dot matrix Okidata printer. They must have spent like a million dollars. An amazing feat, because we were barely middle class.
After learning how to turn it on, writing to the diskette, printing demo images, playing Ultima, I started to code some BASIC. Nobody taught me, I just picked the manual and started coding.
My first programs were something along the line of:
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
30 END
Now, for an 8 year old kid who was teaching himself how to use the damn thing it was pretty awesome to pull such simple programs.
Then at age 9 I bought my first "computer", a Tandy PC-7 at the local Radio Shack (after saving my lunch money for months).
Now, as a hacker/programmer/software engineer/whatchamacallit I look back at those days and appreciate what my parents and brother did.
Such experience has led me to teach my nine year old niece how to "program" in HTML. She enjoys it very much, and even asked me to put Ubuntu on her desktop. My daughter will also learn how to code, even though I don't expect her to follow in my footsteps.
tl;dr: Teach your kids how to code. They might go on to become hackers themselves.
Now, back at home we didn't have many fancy electronics stores, so this huge emporium of transistors was pretty amazing for all of us.
My mother hinted that they were going to buy us a Nintendo (NES), and I was ecstatic. I had never heard of such thing, but seeing Super Mario Bros. on the display machine was pretty mind blowing for an eight year old.
But, my oldest brother (who was a bigger nerd than me) did not want the NES. Crap. I was furious, and really disappointed. Instead, he wanted some stupid computer. It was big, bulky, ugly (light brown with black function keys!), and required a huge monitor to be of any use. It also required a disk drive (a 1541 model).
Yes, my brother wanted a Commodore C64.
So, my parents decided against the NES (oh the humanity!), and purchased the C64 with a 13-inch (I think) color monitor, a 1541 disk drive, and a color dot matrix Okidata printer. They must have spent like a million dollars. An amazing feat, because we were barely middle class.
After learning how to turn it on, writing to the diskette, printing demo images, playing Ultima, I started to code some BASIC. Nobody taught me, I just picked the manual and started coding.
My first programs were something along the line of:
10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10 30 END
Now, for an 8 year old kid who was teaching himself how to use the damn thing it was pretty awesome to pull such simple programs.
Then at age 9 I bought my first "computer", a Tandy PC-7 at the local Radio Shack (after saving my lunch money for months).
Now, as a hacker/programmer/software engineer/whatchamacallit I look back at those days and appreciate what my parents and brother did.
Such experience has led me to teach my nine year old niece how to "program" in HTML. She enjoys it very much, and even asked me to put Ubuntu on her desktop. My daughter will also learn how to code, even though I don't expect her to follow in my footsteps.
tl;dr: Teach your kids how to code. They might go on to become hackers themselves.