I’m currently reading Eugenia Cheng’s book Beyond Infinity. In it she talks about learning to program on a Spectrum as a child and writing a Hello World program. This reminded me of my first experience of programming as a child.

I was programming a Dragon 32. We had the following book. I remember writing some of the shorter programs. My little fingers couldn’t manage more than 10 lines or so of code. I think the one I remember most was the Kaleidoscope program. I was amazed that I had managed to write this program that randomly drew these coloured dots all over the screen. This is despite not having a clue as to how the program worked.

Incidentally the book starts with

The Dragon 32 is probably the most sophisticated piece of equipment that you possess.

While this seems kind of laughable now it was no doubt true at that point in the early 80’s.