My introduction to computers was similar. I began by learning turtle graphics in the Logo programming language during my childhood days. It allowed me to be creative and draw pictures on a blank canvas using code. Back then, for me, programming was not about solving useful problems. Instead it was about expressing whatever random ideas come to mind.
Quoting a relevant excerpt from my own blog post[1] that I wrote sometime back:
> FD 100
> That is the "hello, world" of turtle graphics in Logo. That simple line of code changed my world. I could make stuff happen in an otherwise mostly blank monochrome CRT display. Until then I had seen CRTs in televisions where I had very little control on what I see on the screen. But now, I had control! The turtle became my toy and I could make it draw anything on a 320 × 250 canvas.
Me too. I learned LOGO in the 90's during 3rd grade. Now thinking back, it was probably an important defining moment in my life because it let me experience creativity through coding and visual feedback (and also the constant discovery of new ways of using the various commands).
Similar sort of experience, although we had no turtle, so it was BASIC on the MICRO for us.
10 MODE 7
20 PRINT CHR$141”A text adventure”
30 PRINT CHR$141”A text adventure”
May as well have been the opening bars of Beethoven’s 5th, for the infinite and incredible possibilities which followed. Anything. I could make anything. It was the most incredible sensation and realisation - and still is.
I think this kind of experience is missing for kids now – but I'd guess it's more about how ubiquitous computers are, and how there's a lot more between the kid and the computer. When a CLI is your interface, making even rudimentary graphics feels like achieving magic. When your interface is a cell phone or GUI, there's a much larger leap from zero to "feels like magic" – OK, so I made a circle bounce around the screen... there's already an app that does that.
Totally. I mean, as ridiculous as it may seem, the thing that got me into Linux was seeing a printout of a screenshot of Enlightenment 15 and just going “what is that” - and for me, the idea that a GUI could be visually exciting was revelatory - I ended up wrapping my head around SuSE 4.2 on hardware it hated, getting E16 running (hey, it took me a while to figure out X, never mind anything else), and ended up learning C, C++ and Ruby because I wanted to make more of this unbelievably cool (in a very 90’s way) stuff.
Now… Great UIs are everywhere. You can just use them. You don’t need to poke under the hood, or learn the mechanics of CRTs, or compile a kernel and a zillion libraries to get them working - you just flip open your phone, or hit up the uri.
I think there’s something quite specific about having learned the trade through that cusp, that changing of worlds - if you started with punch cards and ended with dumb terminals, your world changed only somewhat, and always had a utilitarian edge to it - we went through that Bildungsroman of growth and explosive expansion as a natural function of our environment.
I feel somewhat blessed to have been born in possibly the most interesting time since Gutenberg wrote “hallo, welt”.
Heh, Enlightenment (somewhere before DR13) was also what got me interested in Linux, as a kid. But, in retrospect, I'd classify it as a "pretty UI" rather than a "great UI."
Quoting a relevant excerpt from my own blog post[1] that I wrote sometime back:
> FD 100
> That is the "hello, world" of turtle graphics in Logo. That simple line of code changed my world. I could make stuff happen in an otherwise mostly blank monochrome CRT display. Until then I had seen CRTs in televisions where I had very little control on what I see on the screen. But now, I had control! The turtle became my toy and I could make it draw anything on a 320 × 250 canvas.
[1] https://susam.in/blog/fd-100.html