I learned to code on a ZX Spectrum as a 6 year old in 1982 – by copying BASIC code from the Spectrum manual. It was literally the most amazing thing that had ever happened to me, to be able to see what i had typed come to life on the T.V.
My brother who is six years older than me, taught me to code my first game – “Pangolins.” You had to think up an animal, and the computer then tried to guess what it was, by asking you questions that you could answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. If it had never heard of your animal before, it would ask you to give it some question that it could use next time to find out whether the next player had given it the new animal.
It was all text, and no graphics – Later i learned to “hack code” that you found in games magazines.
Yup in the good old days, games magazines came with actual code that you could type out and run … or that was the goal.
God help you. if you made a mistake when typing out all those hundreds of lines of code. You had to suddenly become Sherlock Holmes, and discover why your program wouldn’t run.
Back in the day (early to mid 90’s) If you wanted to write serious programs on the PC or just wanted to learn to code in C++ or Pascal, you needed to spend serious money on a compiler. I remember for Computer Science i needed to buy copies of Borland Turbo Pascal and Borland Turbo C++ .
Theey came in these huge boxes, with 20 discs and had a whole bunch of thick manuals.
Today though, coding languages and free or low cost commercial grade development tools are readily available.
Programming languages like Ruby on Rails and Javascript are free, and so are the tools that let you write code.
Even though i am an entrepreneur, and have never coded as a career – The ability to to code has taught me valuable business and life skills.
Learning to code is not just a skill, it teaches you to learn to think better. Coding has also taught me how to think more analytically, how to break problems into smaller pieces and how to efficiently solve problems.
Today, online courses like Code School, Plural Sight, Treehouse, and online coding Bootcamps like Coder Manual, make it really easy to learn to code, and to find coding related jobs if you are so inclined.