For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for July 26, 2015

The dawn of the great new age….

But, that’s how a lot of future software developers get their start.

When Mike said “jumping man”, I thought he meant old-time “Mario” (before he was known as Mario).

And now you can do it in five minutes!

Sorry Ellie, but what skill have you learned or exhibited?

Way to stifle the creativity of young ones, Ellie. Luckily they don’t seem discouraged.

Be thankful, Ellie, for the children were quiet for a few hours.

My first program was a golf game on a HP-80. It had a small black and white screen, a thermal printer and a disk drive. HP-basic was great for simple graphics.

Good work boys. To others how do you create a program?

We used to type a simple program into the Commodore 64 computers on display at the store:10 Print “Hi”20 Go to 10Then we would type “run” and watch the thing go into a continuous loop. Drove the sales people nuts because most of them didn’t know how to break the loop.

And that’s how the battle of “CG vs. traditional” animation began.

I had a computer course in college which included punch cards and flow charts and Fortran. Absolutely hated it.

Fortran and punch cards. What memories.

I’d bet that her volume goes to “11”, too.

I think Brian grew up to become a computer game developer.

The guy who comes over to “fix” our computers is 17!

A passing fad that people will grow tired of. Just like TV, radio, the car…

One can use both a pencil and paper and a computer. it’s not a contest.

Keep in mind that Elly grew up in the 1950s, when computers were mostly used by businesses or the military. The personal computer was unheard of. As such, her worldview was different. Elly also has tunnel vision in the activities of her children. That was evidenced by her asking “What USE is it?” which is her way of asking “What will that do to put food on your table when you are grown up?”

This was a decade before internet existed?

Where did they get "fan-fold paper?I’m suprised the boys didn’t have the program on a stack of “Hollerith” cards. ;-)

TheSkulker: Mainly the basics of animation. I still have some “flip books” I made as a kid and totally awed my own kids with them once.

My father worked in Oak Ridge on the A bomb(nuclear physicist). He got stuck in the 50s, he did not embrace any of the inventions since. My brother majored in math at Cal(before Computer Sciences) and my father thought they were just gibberish. Sad, really, that some people refuse to learn anything more.

What’s the use of drawing pictures on paper over and over and over?