Apple ][’s made a generation of programmers

This video is of a 7 year old back in 1982 talking about programming on some local access show. He demonstrates coding BASIC on an Apple ][.

This strikes a chord with me, because around the exact same time, at around the same age, I went to a summer camp for budding computer nerds in the deserts of southern California. It was the same scenario too, we were kids learning BASIC on Apple ][. Our imaginations were fueled by shows like Whiz Kids and movies like WarGames. Not to mention the explosion of science fiction novels at the time. I still have the binder I used to map out my programs and keep printouts of them some 25 years ago.

I’ve never shaken that love of computers and programming, and I’m glad I got to grow up with it. Now that computers are ubiquitous, “hackers” aren’t such special snowflakes, but I still feel the nostalgia of when it was a budding science and I was still a bud myself.

Man, this website really is turning into a blog. So be it.