When I was a kid in the 90s I had a PC that came with Windows 3.1 and it had QBasic. I messed around with it a lot. I spent a lot of time reading the built-in documentation.
I remember making a random password generator, a text-based blackjack game, and some “screensavers” that were basically just drawing a bunch of stuff on the screen and then scrolling it off the top by printing blank lines.
It took quite a bit of time to do that pretty basic stuff, so it’s really not a surprise to me that most people aren’t making computer programs today. Most of anything an average person could hope to program has already been done and made available for free.
I did basically all those things, or very similar things, in TI-BASIC back in high school. I didn’t care that they had already been done countless times; I had a blast figuring out how to make them work.
I dearly wish more people would try making basic programs that are 100% their own creation, even if it’s some random string generator. It’s more rewarding than they might think!
Same here. I missed the lecture of many math classes figuring out basic on my ti84+. I mostly wrote simple games. The calculator made it easy to experiment since all the functionality could be found in menus or a button somewhere.
Yep, same! It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t know the first thing about Z80 assembly or I’d have flunked hard 😂 I would have loved to make my own clone of Phoenix!
When I was a kid in the 90s I had a PC that came with Windows 3.1 and it had QBasic. I messed around with it a lot. I spent a lot of time reading the built-in documentation.
I remember making a random password generator, a text-based blackjack game, and some “screensavers” that were basically just drawing a bunch of stuff on the screen and then scrolling it off the top by printing blank lines.
It took quite a bit of time to do that pretty basic stuff, so it’s really not a surprise to me that most people aren’t making computer programs today. Most of anything an average person could hope to program has already been done and made available for free.
I did basically all those things, or very similar things, in TI-BASIC back in high school. I didn’t care that they had already been done countless times; I had a blast figuring out how to make them work.
I dearly wish more people would try making basic programs that are 100% their own creation, even if it’s some random string generator. It’s more rewarding than they might think!
Same here. I missed the lecture of many math classes figuring out basic on my ti84+. I mostly wrote simple games. The calculator made it easy to experiment since all the functionality could be found in menus or a button somewhere.
Yep, same! It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t know the first thing about Z80 assembly or I’d have flunked hard 😂 I would have loved to make my own clone of Phoenix!
nibbles.bas, a classic. I wonder if you can pay it online.