There is a lot of excitement around the current trend to get more people to be into computer programming. Whether or not they end up becoming coders, we can all at least can gain a bit from “computational thinking.” Perhaps with this movement, computer users will all eventually become computational creators. Unlikely, but we can perhaps view this as a return to the early days of personal computers.
The first computer my family owned was the Commodore VIC-20, the “wonder computer of the 1980s,” in the evocative language of William Shatner. You could purchase programs, of course, and they came on cassette tapes. But one of the things I remember about this early age of computing (later in the Eighties we got our first Macintosh and have remained in the Apple family since), was the incredible profusion of programs in magazines.
Specifically, if you were interested in a piece of software, you didn’t necessarily buy it. Rather, you read about it in a magazine, which along with the description, included pages of the actual code. You would type this in yourself into the machine, and bam, instant new piece of software. These are known as type-in programs .
I have hazy memories of my family using type-ins. I remember a Pac-Man clone, with racecars instead of the well-known yellow pie hero, which likely came from a cassette. But I also remember a downhill skiing game, which we initially entered in incorrectly and yielded some bizarre graphics and was probably my first experience with a software bug.
I was very little when we had this machine and so I didn’t learn how to program it. But I’m certain that entering a BASIC program, line by line, into a machine must have some sort of salutary effect on the user. Whether consciously or not, it began the transformation from user to creator.
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