Let's take a trip down memory lane and share the tech gadgets or toys from our childhood that sparked our love for coding. Whether it was a classic game console, a programmable robot, or even a basic calculator, we all have that one gadget that set our imagination on fire.
So, what was your favorite childhood tech companion that fueled your interest in coding? Share your stories, fond memories, and how that gadget influenced your journey into the world of programming.🤖🎮🚀
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Top comments (15)
Initially an Apple][e basic starting at age 7, then it waned for a while. Then I seen a small public tv spot about kids making games with HyperCard on a Mac about age 11. Oh hey, we have that on our Mac LCII, and then it never stopped.
Programmable calculator on dad's table with neon digits.
Video Games I think originally sparked the curiosity in how they worked which led me to learn what coding even is. But also just having a old shitty family computer (I think first one we had was an older Win 95 eMachines gifted to us in early the 2000s) and trying to learn how it works by also deleting things I shouldn’t trying to “speed it up” 🤣
Not necessarily a gadget, but video games and Myspace both made me interested in code and front end development. I used to play around with Myspace themes and learned how to manipulate certain things just by messing around. I also was very interested in how people made mods for games and emulators, so that sparked my desire to learn programming.
It must be my Android tablet. It had a single-core CPU and 30 games installed on it. My cousin did something and my tablet got stuck in a boot loop. I asked a lot of people around me if they could fix it. Well, nobody understood computers better than I did, at that time (I was 11 years old!!!). It took me 2 years to fix it. But in the meantime, I got exposed to a lot of things like command prompts, terminals, Linux, batch files, websites, etc. And, that's how it all began.
Technically the N64, but it wasn't the console itself.
I wanted to make a game at one point, Kitty Katty, that would be based off ov Banjo Kazooie; Banjo Kazooie, which originated on the Nintendo 64.
I liked the game, I also really liked Banjo Tooie for some its features, such as interconnected worlds, and the ability to split up and play with one or both characters; in turn, I wanted to make my own thing that was similar.
The result is what is now my fursona.
Making my first red box when I was 12. My first computer, a KIM-1, was still a year away...
Red box for phreaking? Nice 🙂
I prefer the more euphemistic "telephone hobbyist" ;)
A gadget? Not sure... but Sonic the Hedgehog video games make me learn programming in the Scratch platform because I wanted to create my own video games, however, I ended up loving more web design than video game design, haha.
Checking out the source code to my games on my Apple ][ Plus
The family Pentium computer with an early version of Photoshop on it, making me wonder how the filters worked. I needed to learn to make my own!
A game magazine that has a small HTML tutorial in 1998
None. I am too old for that... I was 16 in 1980, when ZX 80 came out, I got my first home computer (a ZX Spectrum) few years later