I distinctly remember my first program as a five-year-old child:
10 PRINT "CHAZ WOZ ERE "
20 GOTO 10
In the UK one of the main retailers of 8bit computers was Boots the Chemist. This store is functionally equivalent to America's CVS or Walgreens (who know owns a big chunk of Boots). They would have all the computers on shelves hooked up to TVs. And of course, almost all computers of the day would boot into BASIC.
My Mum would leave me in Boots in front of the computers while she went around town for hours doing the shopping each week and I would happily learn programming, picking up new ideas from older teenagers who would be happy to show off their superior coding skills.
It would be three years until my parents could buy me a Spectrum of my own. In that time before I had my own, my Dad would pick up the occasional computer book from a second-hand store and I would read technical manuals and programming books cover-to-cover in my bedroom, having to imagine the output in my head.
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I distinctly remember my first program as a five-year-old child:
10 PRINT "CHAZ WOZ ERE "
20 GOTO 10
In the UK one of the main retailers of 8bit computers was Boots the Chemist. This store is functionally equivalent to America's CVS or Walgreens (who know owns a big chunk of Boots). They would have all the computers on shelves hooked up to TVs. And of course, almost all computers of the day would boot into BASIC.
My Mum would leave me in Boots in front of the computers while she went around town for hours doing the shopping each week and I would happily learn programming, picking up new ideas from older teenagers who would be happy to show off their superior coding skills.
It would be three years until my parents could buy me a Spectrum of my own. In that time before I had my own, my Dad would pick up the occasional computer book from a second-hand store and I would read technical manuals and programming books cover-to-cover in my bedroom, having to imagine the output in my head.
Those were the days!