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Showerthought: my grandpa's machine shop had a whole BASIC program he typed in from a magazine in 1983, and it was 14 lines
I was going through his old binders in the garage last month and found a handwritten sheet of BASIC he copied from a magazine, just 14 lines to make a dot bounce around the screen. He never touched a computer again after that, but he kept the printout for 40 years. 14 lines. My first python script was longer than that and all it did was print my name. Anyone else got a family member who messed with code for like one week and then bailed forever?
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phoenixk6417h ago
Grandpa energy is REAL because my uncle did almost the same thing. He took one Fortran class at the community college in like 1988, wrote a program that calculated batting averages for his softball team, and then never wrote a line of code again in his LIFE. The thing that got me was finding his old notebook with the program handwritten in it, line by line, like it was some kind of precious artifact. What worked for me was scanning the pages before they fell apart and asking him to walk me through what each part did while he still remembered. He lit up like a Christmas tree explaining it, way more than he ever did talking about his actual job. Those 40 years your grandpa kept that printout means it mattered to him, even if he never touched a keyboard again. Get it laminated or take a good photo of it, because stuff like that is family history now.
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