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I just graduated with a Computer Science degree, and started an awesome job doing cool stuff with code. How did I start? Not anywhere on my computer, I can assure you. I was programming furiously, and gaining a lot of experience I still draw on, before I wrote a single line of code on a keyboard.
After all, pretty much everybody in my 7th-grade math class had a Texas Instruments TI82 calculator. Which have a language that looks a lot like a version of BASIC. And so, within a couple of weeks, we were using the supplied links to swap programs around between one another's calculators - games, mostly. Simple text-based affairs where we fought demons, bought and sold narcotics, and raced cars. Some were happy with that.
But some of us - like me - weren't satisfied, and we cracked open the games we were playing, and started fiddling around. What if I double this number? Suddenly, my attacks are twice as powerful! What if I tweak this equation? A whole new racetrack! And lo and behold, now I can buy and sell my classmates instead of drugs! I was hooked. By the time winter break hit, I'd moved past tweaking games and put together several basic tools to make my life in math and science classes easier. I tried building a game from scratch, but had to abandon it when I realized that my design was simply beyond the extremely limited capabilites of the little machine's language - never mind the slow going imposed by those tiny chicklet keys.
These days, the calculators are a lot more powerful, and a bit cheaper, but the language is still pretty simple. It's still pretty BASIC. We used to have a few kids getting family computers with a simple language avialable. Today, we have lots of kids getting tiny little computers of their very own, every one of them just four AAA batteries away from HELLO WORLD.
