My first exposure was Commodore PET computers at the high school (I'm old). Nobody had home computers then, this stuff was crazy expensive, even a floppy disk (singular!) to save your work on the shared drive (on a dolly - it could be hotplugged) was >$20 in today's money. But what you could use all you want was the line printer (a CBM 2022) and its consumables. So at the end of whatever computer room time you could scrounge (lunch, who needs lunch?) you'd print off your 3-4 page epic program to continue coding and debugging with a pencil, on the long school bus ride. This does form "slow" habits. To this day I detest autocomplete, autoindent, syntax highlighters and the like. Never did hand assemble though.
I had a Vic20 but after it was stolen was the first kid in my neighbourhood to get a disc drive with a C64. Floppys were more expensive early but I remember about $20 for a box 10 - still a lot of 80's money! Learning you could double side a disc with a hole punch (and later the nibbler tool) is one of the head-exploding moments of my computer life.
OT: others are the first times I drew graphics on the amber monitor of a PC clone and adding data to a BE database and then seeing said data on a webpage. I think my security was about the same as current-day Lovable :)
OOT: Thinking about it, I believe the pure wonder & joy came because it seemed like magic, but then you figured out how it worked which gave you an immense feeling of power and self-determination. I worry that with AI today you'll get the former and never the latter, which will have serious, long-term ramifications. I hope I'm wrong.
OT: others are the first times I drew graphics on the amber monitor of a PC clone and adding data to a BE database and then seeing said data on a webpage. I think my security was about the same as current-day Lovable :)
OOT: Thinking about it, I believe the pure wonder & joy came because it seemed like magic, but then you figured out how it worked which gave you an immense feeling of power and self-determination. I worry that with AI today you'll get the former and never the latter, which will have serious, long-term ramifications. I hope I'm wrong.