Programming at 8 years old

Remember When Software Came From a Magazine?

Before the internet, before app stores, and even before most people owned software on disks, there was another way to get programs: you typed them yourself.

Magazines in the 1980s would print entire programs line by line. Kids like me would sit at the keyboard and type hundreds of lines of code, hoping we didn't make a mistake somewhere along the way.

One magazine I remember from childhood was 3-2-1 Contact Magazine, connected to the PBS show 3-2-1 Contact. It was full of science experiments and technology ideas, and occasionally you’d see computer listings you could try at home.

Other magazines went even deeper into it. Titles like Compute!, Creative Computing, and BYTE regularly published full programs that readers could type into their home computers.

Most of the code was written in BASIC, which came built into many machines at the time. If you had a Commodore 64, Apple II, or TRS-80, you could start programming immediately.

Sometimes the program worked perfectly the first time.

If you had an error, you’d go back through the pages line by line trying to find the typo. And in the process you accidentally learned something important: how computers actually worked.

Looking back, it was a strange but wonderful time when learning to code was just part of the adventure of using a computer.

If you grew up during this era, you probably remember the excitement (and frustration) of typing in pages of code from a magazine and hoping it would run. It was slow, but it was one of the earliest hands-on introductions many people had to programming.