I spent days entering code on the Spectrum 48k from a magazine just to play space invaders.
We had a radio show on a local station being broadcast every friday evening at 22:00 where various open source programs for different platforms (C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, etc) would be aired. You could then record the show (which consisted mostly of "whiirrrzzzzzzbrbrrzzziii"), and load the programs on your computer of choice.
Those were the days where you'd spend hours browsing your local magazine shop for new and exiting computer magazines, and debugging included reading manuals, and not just pasting code from StackOverflow :)
I often think back to the world when i was a kid, and while the Internet has certainly made a lot of things easier, i'm not always convinced that it's actually helping. When answers to every question you have are readily available, what happens to curiosity ? At age 11 i could hook up just about any home computer, program in BASIC, could take apart electronics and fix them (which was a lot easier back then).
I learned by taking things apart (and rarely breaking them in the process), and for those more specialized things (electronics) there were evening classes for kids. We had a "programming class" when i was a kid that was basically just a lab. Show up at 18:30 and "here's a RC 700 Piccolo (https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=650) to use for whatever you like". There was no set program, and the instructor was the other kids in class. Those were the best classes i've ever taken.
I never knew that programs were broadcast, that makes total sense and it's completely awesome that you could just analog record a program from a radio program into the system like that!
The simplicity of the cassette tape recording (and playing) mechanism and how it works w/ a simple 5V amplitude modulated signal makes me happy thinking about it every time I see something related to it mentioned.
We had a radio show on a local station being broadcast every friday evening at 22:00 where various open source programs for different platforms (C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, etc) would be aired. You could then record the show (which consisted mostly of "whiirrrzzzzzzbrbrrzzziii"), and load the programs on your computer of choice.
Those were the days where you'd spend hours browsing your local magazine shop for new and exiting computer magazines, and debugging included reading manuals, and not just pasting code from StackOverflow :)
I often think back to the world when i was a kid, and while the Internet has certainly made a lot of things easier, i'm not always convinced that it's actually helping. When answers to every question you have are readily available, what happens to curiosity ? At age 11 i could hook up just about any home computer, program in BASIC, could take apart electronics and fix them (which was a lot easier back then).
I learned by taking things apart (and rarely breaking them in the process), and for those more specialized things (electronics) there were evening classes for kids. We had a "programming class" when i was a kid that was basically just a lab. Show up at 18:30 and "here's a RC 700 Piccolo (https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=650) to use for whatever you like". There was no set program, and the instructor was the other kids in class. Those were the best classes i've ever taken.