Getting the younger generations more involved

[ZeroByte]

I'm sure most of us are already doing what we can to share our passion for this stuff with our own kids / grandkids, but I've been thinking lately that there will never be a better time than now to "infect" as many people with the retrocomputing bug as possible. Right now, retro computing is at an apex - pixel art is popular. Indie games tend to use pixel art style. It's never been easier to resurrect old boxes with things like SD replacements for IDE/SCSI/PCI/ISA/etc. This hobby is to gen-X what tinkering around with muscle cars was to the boomers. I have been thinking about what sort of things would be required to start a successful retro computing club here in my home town, meeting at one of the libraries. What kinds of activities would be the most accessible and interesting to younger people, especially teenagers?

I mean, having a "seminar" / lecture / presentation on how to do BASIC programming or Assembly or whatever would be useful, but such topics aren't exactly great starter material for getting new blood interested in this stuff. Should it be integrated with Raspberry Pi / Arduino type stuff? Clearly, it would suck to have to lug a bunch of this kit down to the library every 4th Saturday, yet I think it would be really important to have real HW for people to touch and interact with. It's a lot more cool to see than just some blue window on a Lenovo laptop.

I've got a nephew who has a mind capable of gobbling up content like Ben Eater, but he's just interested in making stuff in Minecraft or watching TickTock videos. If he lived in the same city as I do, I'd bring him over to help build the 6502-on-a-breadboard project.

I know this post has been kinda rambly, but it's been on my mind lately, and I really am itching to share this stuff with people who would love it if only they knew it was a thing, and were able to get away from the brain candy for long enough to find out how fun and fulfilling it is to actually make something instead of just watch others do it on YT, or worse - just watch people floss dancing with "snapchat" filters over their faces on TikTok.

[Cyber]

I was thinking about similar things myself, but I could not think of any plan which would work. Youngsters don't have this nostalgia, that we have. They grown up with totally different technology around them (cellphones, tablets, etc.) Interesting them might be a difficult task, maybe close to impossible.

I thought they could be interested based on historical interest. So, maybe start with some sort of interactive museum where you can learn compuer history and try using some machines yourself as a bonus. It could be not a real museum, but virtual. Or partialy virtual. Maybe somebody would like that very much and got dragged in.

[DrTypo]

That's a tough question. I have a nephew who is into Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite. He makes YouTube videos about these games. When you come down to it, it's pretty cool and creative. It is just completely alien to us, "GenXer's". He's also starting to code in Python. Why would he bother programming on old machines? Or "old new" like the X16?

The thing old an "old new" machine has over modern machines is coding to the metal. But it's a tough sell. It's not like say, old music or movies which you can appreciate immediately. Coding to the metal is very rewarding but requires some serious commitment.

I've seen young kids/teenagers appreciate old music and movies (by old I means 70's,80's and 90's). There is an immediate appeal. Not so much with old machines. Like Cyber, I don't see how you could interest them in old machines. That's too bad because I really thing the closeness to the hardware is a very learning experience.

 

 

 

[rje]

But, it's not a modern pop culture experience; even in the 80s, kids played on the C64 because it had current graphics and sound and had a vast current library, not because it was otherwise special.

People are the same today.  They play with computers that have current graphics and sound and a vast current library.

The niche that are engineers is smaller but extant.  Some of them appreciate the 6502, but they have to like digital logic and assembly language to begin with...

 

[ZeroByte]

I think Arduino would make a good gateway drug. A friend used a pair of WiFi-capable units to make her own wireless NES controller adapters- very few lines of code were necessary, actually.

[wahsp]

Not sure if the rambling below is very helpful, but well...

I think the others have already pointed out some possible pitfalls in the idea. There won't be the same sense of nostalgia (although, as I have mentioned in other posts, the same goes for me and that is not necessarily a barrier to getting into retrocomputing). I think you could draw in people with the idea that they can "learn to program their own games", but I expect they'd rather learn to use the more recently developed tools for that. I expect that the young of today would want learn to how to code something like the next PUBG, rather than something like boulder dash. Yet, maybe you could make use of (1) the fact that things like pixel art and such indeed seem to have grown in popularity and (2) that you can actually feasibly create a retro-style game by yourself (even though that point is of course flawed, because you can equally well develop simple games with more recent tools). 

Another thought: Maybe the focus should not be on the 'retro-ness' of computers but on their relative simplicity. Because of their relative simplicity and their limitations, it is actually more feasible than with more recent machines to get to a point where you get close to "understanding everything about your machine". Coding "to the metal" is part of that, and with simpler, more limited computers it is much more of a necessity (and therefore more inviting) than with today's highly overpowered machines and compilers that probably do a much better job than an enthusiast could ever do. I don't have hands-on experience with Raspberry Pi or Arduino, but I imagine that on that front they have an appeal that is similar to that of retro-computers, while having a more 'modern edge'? Affordability is also a nice benefit of something like Raspberry Pi. 

 

[Ender]

Well, as someone who is probably younger than a lot of people here (I was a kid of the 90's) I can say it is possible to get into this sort of stuff as a kid way after its prime.  My circumstances were different from most 90's kids though, who were playing Doom or Commander Keen on their 90's computers.  My parents were always very late/hesitant adopters of technology when I was a kid (not so much now) and so we never even had a computer at my house until probably the late 90's. However, my uncle was a Commodore buff and my earliest memories of computers was playing games on his C64.  I was also introduced to BASIC through him and I found it fascinating.  And then, for my 10th birthday (which would have been in '97) he gave me one of his C64's (which he took back and gave me a C128 a year later).  I spent many hours playing games and typing in programs from books on the C64.  My parents got a Windows 98 computer at some point, but I never really had an interest in using it much outside of school work.  Then in 2002 my family finally got the internet, and from there my interest finally went over to "modern" computers.  I never really used the Commodore much after that, and now it's in a box in the basement.

I want to say, then, that it's possible to get a young kid interested in programming with BASIC like I was, but things are different now.  I'm honestly not sure I would have taken as much of an interest in the C64 back then if my family had had the internet from the start ?.  I'd like to think I would though, since I remember thinking BASIC was really cool, and I just found the act of typing a thing into a computer and then seeing it do the thing you wanted amazing.

[ZeroByte]

I think the most lasting feature of retro computers is the fact that they're simple enough that you can have a good understanding of everything in there. There're only a small number of chips and subsystems to learn about when it comes to programming, and if you're more into the hardware side of things, the bus architecture is fairly straightforward and accessible too. What's cool is that even though there's only a small number of things to grasp (comparatively), any one of them can become this rabbit hole of ever-deepening knowledge and skill. Speaking of the C64, there are people who keep finding ways to push SID - it's not been terribly long ago that the technique (I forget what the sceners call it) where you can use the triangle waveform to output PCM in much higher quality than the old 4bit master volume technique. Then there are others who go down the VIC-II rabbit hole and create techniques like FSP(?) for fast horizontal scrolling of bitmaps, etc.

But I wouldn't say you have to be at these levels to say that you understand the computer very well.

[kelli217]

12 hours ago, ZeroByte said:

I think the most lasting feature of retro computers is the fact that they're simple enough that you can have a good understanding of everything in there. There're only a small number of chips and subsystems to learn about when it comes to programming, and if you're more into the hardware side of things, the bus architecture is fairly straightforward and accessible too. What's cool is that even though there's only a small number of things to grasp (comparatively), any one of them can become this rabbit hole of ever-deepening knowledge and skill. Speaking of the C64, there are people who keep finding ways to push SID - it's not been terribly long ago that the technique (I forget what the sceners call it) where you can use the triangle waveform to output PCM in much higher quality than the old 4bit master volume technique. Then there are others who go down the VIC-II rabbit hole and create techniques like FSP(?) for fast horizontal scrolling of bitmaps, etc.



But I wouldn't say you have to be at these levels to say that you understand the computer very well.

I think it's the pulse waveform and PWM audio.  https://gist.github.com/munshkr/30f35e39905e63876ff7

[Strider]

I tried to get my 4 kids into technology when they were young, trying to pass on my experience and knowledge, and it sort of worked, with my two boys. :P

The two girls didn't get into it much, however my youngest (19) is a "gamer", but that's where her interest stops. She just wants it all to work, and that's all left up to me.

The two boys (30 & 28), I started them playing Amiga 500 games early on, then moved to DOS games, and on up from there, including consoles from the NES on up. They loved it, and both think it's cool, but neither of them really mess with it these days. They both play games, but only on modern hardware, they are not really into retro. Though one of my sons did spend a few years in the Air Force working in cyber security. So he is still very much into tech, just not retro tech.

I agree, I think it's difficult to get people to really dive into the older tech becasue they don't have the nostalgia we have. They didn't grow up with it. Back then it was all we had and we were blown away by it. These days, you can't help but compare it to modern hardware and I think that's were we lose a lot of people.

Still, I think the Commander X16 has a chance to bring more people to the retro side. The fact it's not an emulator, like just about everything else out there, that's it's real "modern" hardware, makes it a portal to the 80's that people may be more willing to go through. Especially since original 80's hardware is getting so hard to find and hard to maintain unless you know what you're doing and actually want to do it. Not to mention the cost. I know a lot of people that look at the price for some of these older systems like the C64, Amiga's, Tandy 1000's, etc. and think people are crazy for spending that much on old hardware they see as obsolete.