I wrote a program in Basic on my Commodore 64 at 6.
I didn’t know how to save my work. I typed and manually proofread code for three hours. It worked. The program was lost when I powered it down.
this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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My brother in arms….
Our Commodore VIC20 came with a big book/manual which mostly taught you how to code. Was an awesome time.
Veronica Explains has a great video on how manuals used to actually be great resources.
Manuals still are fantastic when available.
Yeah the “OS” was essentially a basic interpreter and simple editor. I remember that book.
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I wrote basic on my Apple IIe.
I was all Apple/Mac until 1998 when I built a Windows gaming pc with high school graduation money. Learned to code in art school, after which I switched back to Macs when they went intel, built annoying but fun flash ads and games in AS2 (ECMAscript essentially), then when the iPhone came out I switched to hand coding HTML/CSS/JS web apps and got out of advertising.
Then learned Ruby/Sinatra/Rails/Haml/SASS and did straight web dev into the early days of both React, Angular and Vue. Then quit to do a tech startup with robots.
Now I CAD model original designs for fabrication projects, 3D printing and custom automotive designs.
So I’m pretty technically inclined, but I own 4 Macs, 3 Rpis, dozens of physical computing platforms, and a metric ton of salvaged sensors and ex-RadioShack components.
I think it was pretty common back then to have no way to save. Spectrum zx. Amstrad 464. They didn’t initially have a media to save to. Then cassette tapes could be used. Software piracy was recording the tape, like copying a song.
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I think dumb people need to hold onto the idea that smart people are a bunch of nerds with no physical fitness, coordination, game with the opposite sex, autism, allergies, and asthma to distract them from the fact that smart people are on average better people along many correlated dimensions and on others no worse than average.
I used to sell apple gear
I had to keep telling off other sales people who kept saying OSX was based on Linux, not Unix
Ignoring data to prove your hypothesis is correct sounds like polling.
Good studies correct for outliers.
To correct, you have to measure them first. How else would you know how much to correct. Measure the variable to control for it is basic good practice.
Discluded? I have another hypothesis.
I have a third hypothesis to add to the mix..
Disclude is a verb that means to exclude or omit something.
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/disclude_v (sorry, paywalled).
Okay, if a fucking dictionary is paywalled we have gone way beyond the red line for social recovery.
I don't think the OED has ever been online for free. They took a different tack to Merriam-Webster and Cambridge, who figured that the ad money was lucrative.
Getting annoyed at paywalling is understandable, but we can't demand that companies make their stuff free just because we want it to be free.
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Those who use the verb discluded should probably be discluded.
Even autocorrect discludes this as a valid word.
Ditch OED, befriend Wiktionary
disclude (third-person singular simple present discludes, present participle discluding, simple past and past participle discluded)
(transitive)
(now nonstandard)
- To disclose, make known.
- To separate, keep apart.
- To exclude, not include; to remove from inclusion.
Wiktionary is the best
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God damnit.
I remember toting around a Linux textbook in 7th grade, because I had just started messing with it.
Same year I got my General and Advanced ham radio licenses.
Does this make me autistic?
7th grade in the US is about 12 years old.
I'm not a doctor, so I won't guess, but...what's your favorite train?
M497 Black Beetle
That's easy, The Lionel No. 381E "State Brown" Passenger Cars are 🔥🔥🔥
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Counter argument: boomers who needed to type commands and swap disks to get a word processor loaded, who knew all the hotkeys required to issue commands and the alt-codes for special characters, who today cannot figure out where the file they were working on saved to.
I'm GenX but this is me. I hate modern computing and the cloud in particular. SharePoint is a close second. I think the last excellent word processor was WordPerfect 5.1. Everything since then is worse than the version before it.
I do have sympathy for people who are trying to figure out SharePoint or mobile OS file systems which just arbitrarily change the rules.
The arbitrary rule changes! I have six different folders labelled "android sucks" because different apps are like "I can't access any directory in your filesystem that I didn't personally create." Motherfucker this machine belongs to me. I created that directory. If I tell an app to access a directory, it should do as I command.
When I first got Tasker, it was life changing. Now I can't even tell it to turn off my damn Bluetooth. I hate google with every fiber of my being.
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Yeah, the first computer I remember in our house, I was 4, it was MSDOS, and my mom knew how to run everything, so she obviously had an understanding of command and all that. To this day, she's still incredibly tech illiterate. Her current improved status is emailing me shit that looks phishy so I can figure things out for her. I still get the calls that "something is wrong," and I need to go unfuck things a little. It's funny.
The windows kids know more because there was a possibility some stuff might work with the right sequence of rituals. The mac kids just knew not to try because nothing will work
I started on classic Mac OS and have a successful tech career. I learned to troubleshoot problems on the Mac by disabling Extensions and deleting Preferences files in the prior century. Learned to use Windows after 2000, and it has been garbage the whole time.
I wasn't advocating for windows, they're both trash
I was writing choose your own adventure games in basic, but the 2k memory cap was challenging, and loading from audio from cassette tapes was just stupid. I've used pretty much every OS (within reason).
I still don't like macs though.
I started in 1981 at 11yo with a ZX81 writing games in BASIC. In 1984 at 14yo I was cracking games on Amstrad CPC6128, Z80 assembly. At 18 in 1988 it was on PC in DOS (8086). Yes I installed Linux 0.99 on my 486 PC in 1992 or something.
Never touched an Apple device.
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What if you got started on an Atari in the 80s?
You should get your AARP card in the mail shortly
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If we're talking post-year-2k macs, you're de-facto going to skew the results as those were less affordable than budget family windows boxes.
I can provide an anecdotal evidence of someone who started in MSX-DOS, then PC MS-DOS, went to Windows, then Unix, back to Windows, then Linux, and now is on Mac.
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