[HN Gopher] Usborne computer and coding books from the 1980s
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Usborne computer and coding books from the 1980s
Author : rwmj
Score : 108 points
Date : 2022-07-23 12:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (usborne.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (usborne.com)
| neilv wrote:
| I remember the robots book. I think we found it in the gift shop
| in a science museum, during a grade school class field trip.
|
| A barrier to a young kid building the robot was the difficulty of
| obtaining critical parts, unless you had a parent helping a lot
| with sourcing and bankrolling.
|
| (In the US, an accessible Radio Shack store had some of the
| parts, and you could improvise some of the hobby shop materials
| from cardboard boxes and wood scrap. But, e.g., a matching pair
| of gearboxed motors were unobtainium that a kid might only find
| in random mail-order catalogs they were just starting to
| discover, at unaffordable prices.)
|
| Today, things are much more accessible, thanks to Adafruit,
| accessible online retailers, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, easier access
| to information (not serendipity of happening to discover whatever
| book/magazine a library/bookstore/friend happened to have), 3D
| printers... even being able to easily get your own PCB design
| fabricated one-off, without expensive materials followed by a
| hazmat incident.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| These 1980s computer books are great and have been discussed in
| past HN threads.
|
| The most striking about these books: they are more readable and
| enjoyable than many programming and computing books published for
| adults today.
|
| The books use illustrations extensively to explain concepts, and
| the layouts are varied and lively to keep readers attentive.
| (Compare to the stranglehold of markdown for any technical
| documentation).
|
| Not only are these Usborne books well-written with clear, concise
| explanations, they are also excellent source for inspiration and
| ideas for anyone writing a technical guide, tutorial or book.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| These are great, gonna share with my favorite young person.
| Reminds me of my commodore manual back in the day.
|
| No relation to Osbourne the computer company or the metal
| vocalist. :-D
| nope96 wrote:
| I've found some neat, mint quality 1980's computer books just
| like these in furniture stores, where they fill the floor model
| bookcases with old books.
| flir wrote:
| This, right here. This is how I learned to program. Especially
| Creepy, Spacegames and Battlegames (but only got that one from
| the library).
| Scuds wrote:
| My local library(US) had a few of these and I'd copied some BASIC
| programs them onto my Apple //c and didn't know why they didn't
| work all the time, specifically $CHR or anything involving peek
| and poke.
|
| 8 year old me knew there was something different about the comic
| art alongside the text, yet I couldn't explain what. Turns out -
| British!
|
| The machine code books would have been useful at that time, but
| again, I'm 8 playing with a hand-me-down Apple with no other
| help. I don't know what I don't know and I have no mentorship and
| no internet or bbs access to download new stuff.
|
| Kids today have access to all the video tutorials they could ever
| want.
|
| e: God DAMN line numbers suck. And double god damn do line
| editors (think ed as opposed to vim) with no proper backspace.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I had the same problem - our family had an Amstrad CPC! It was
| rare to find books that had listings that worked in their
| entirety, but if you had a source of native listings (e.g. in
| the CPC case from magazine Amstrad Action) then it was possible
| to port some of the programs.
|
| I was also too young in those days to be able to understand how
| to port PEEK, POKE and so forth, but I do credit trying to get
| stuff working (often in futility) toward my future interest in
| becoming a professional computer programmer. (Of course I'm not
| writing games like I imagined.) The experience of trying to
| parse mystery code is surprisingly similar to frustrations with
| finding libraries that almost but not quite solve your problem,
| or web layouts that look okay in most browsers until you
| encounter a weird screen size, and so on. I wonder if this
| background is what led me to being the kind of developer who
| greatly prefers maintenance, troubleshooting and bug fixing to
| new feature development.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| I must have read that Better Basic book hundreds of times as a
| kid. So nostalgic to see those graphics again! Not sure how much
| of it I really understood as I was pretty young but no doubt
| played a big part in getting me into programming. Some of their
| books on other topics were awesome too I seem to recall.
| adamddev1 wrote:
| Yes me too exactly! What brought back waves of nostalgia in
| particular were the pictures of robots storing variables in the
| boxes. I remember these were so fascinating to read, bringing
| the code alive.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| The "Write Your Own Fantasy Games" features illustrations by a
| Chris Riddell. Wonder if this is the same Chris Riddell who does
| cartoons for the Guardian, and was UK Children's Laureate from
| 2015-17?
| dcminter wrote:
| I had a handful of the Usborne books as a kid and they were
| inspiring. Seeing the covers brings back the exact feeling of
| being a ten year old kid besotted with microcomputers.
|
| One of the books that's sadly not been made available from the
| Usborne site had a representation of what a future portable
| computer might look like that was hilariously off the mark while
| being perfectly reasonable from the point of view of its era - I
| recall it having what was clearly supposed to be a tiny green CRT
| display for example!
| reiichiroh wrote:
| I only found out recently they are a pyramid scheme.
| klodolph wrote:
| A ton of people in industry don't know what this period of time
| was like because they missed it or didn't have access to
| computers at the time. This was the short period in history where
| the following two things were simultaneously true:
|
| 1. It was normal and expected to program a computer, if you had
| one.
|
| 2. Computers were inexpensive enough that many families could
| reasonably own one at home.
|
| If you go too far back in time, computers were either expensive
| or made from kits, which meant that very few people had them. If
| you look at more recent periods in history, it was no longer
| normal & expected to program computers. During this period, your
| computer came with a manual that explained how to write BASIC,
| and you could get these Usborne books from the public library.
|
| Nowadays, it is easier than ever to learn programming. There are
| all these wonderful tools like Scratch. It's just that the normal
| way to use computers these days is to use premade software. There
| are tons of children who could learn to program, could even teach
| themselves, but who are unaware that the option exists.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Computers were inexpensive enough that many families could
| reasonably own one at home.
|
| Sort of. There were cheap computers like the Commodore 64. But,
| by the time you put together a floppy disk only PC clone in
| mid-80s, you were probably still looking at a few thousand
| dollars so maybe $6K in today's money. Not astronomical but
| still a pretty big purchase. Hard drives were just coming into
| the reach of consumers then but that would have added to the
| price.
| klodolph wrote:
| I don't get this comment. You definitely didn't need a PC
| clone or disk drive to learn to program.
| ghaff wrote:
| BASIC with line numbers and GOTOs was fine as far as it
| went. And I did some programming in that vein for both
| games and engineering utilities. But I moved on pretty
| quickly.
| klodolph wrote:
| That's a good start. Once you've started, you have all
| sorts of options for continuing.
|
| Some people moved on from BASIC by poking machine code
| into memory.
| harvey9 wrote:
| "lunchtimes in the library
|
| Writing down the pokes and peeks"
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IagZIM9MtLo
| rwmj wrote:
| I programmed for years (1981-1985) with line numbers and
| cassette tapes. In hindsight, yes, it was tedious, but
| you don't know what you don't have. I do remember being
| amazed at how fast a 3" [sic] floppy disk was when I
| finally got one. I don't think I have ever used a BASIC
| without line numbers to this day.
| mrob wrote:
| A 48K ZX Spectrum (the most popular model) sold for 129GBP in
| June 1983. According to the first Google result I get for "uk
| rpi inflation calculator"[0], that's equivalent to 523GBP
| today. It was typically used with a television as the
| display, which most families would already have. The usual
| data storage system was cassette tapes, which were also
| widespread at the time, although it was common for people to
| buy cheap dedicated tape recorders for their microcomputers.
| Not as cheap as the options we have now, but most people who
| really wanted one could have found a way to afford it.
|
| [0] https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-
| calculator
| ghaff wrote:
| Right. That's why I mentioned the Commodore 64 which was
| probably roughly similar in capabilities and price. Doing
| programming on such a system was pretty different from a
| PC-compatible however. But it was absolutely a way for kids
| to get started.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Cassette tapes were an awful storage medium though. They
| were just about usable enough for loading software from
| previously written tapes, and even that was slow. Floppy
| disk media was a total game changer, allowing for some
| amount of actual productive work even on the old 8-bit
| machines.
| shever73 wrote:
| They weren't ideal, but I owe my career to writing games
| for the ZX Spectrum and distributing them on cassette. It
| wasn't until 1988 that I was able to get an Amstrad
| PC1512 with floppy drives.
| Zenst wrote:
| Indeed the documentation was a level that service engineers
| today would envy and more so techincal details at a level you
| only get from some serious reverse engineering/hacking today.
|
| Kinda best way to put it is documentation was akin to what you
| would expect from a mature MCU today as comparable level and in
| some ways, more accesable and you felt you owned the computer
| more and had a more intermate understanding.
|
| Though many things go that way, Cars another example and cars
| of that era, you could get documentation and fix yourself.
| Today, you under your hood might as well be a Borg cube.
| keithnz wrote:
| not sure about "expected". Quite a few of my friends and myself
| got computers in this era, vic20s, c64s, Spectrums, Ataris
| mostly. Most of my friends just loaded games. I learnt to
| program mine ( I had a few of these books! ), another friend
| spent a little bit of time learning basic also, but pirating
| quickly became a thing and soon everyone had a ton of games.
| briHass wrote:
| I feel fortunate that, as a child of the early 80s, by the time
| I started programming (age 8 or so), it was the late 80s and
| these personal computers were available for cheap at yard
| sales. One of the first I owned was a VIC20, which I think I
| bought (or convinced my parents to buy) with all the
| peripherals at a garage sale for $30. I got a C64 soon after in
| a similar way.
|
| A few years later, my dad would bring home IBM PC XTs and ATs
| they were throwing out at his work. The rest is, as they say,
| history.
|
| I loved these books, and I'm pretty sure I had almost the
| complete library. A few of these books, a curious kid, and a
| simple computer that boots directly into BASIC, with no
| distractions.
| enneff wrote:
| Basically describes my experience too.
|
| One thing that was amazing about this time is that even a
| 10yo (as I was) could understand almost everything that was
| going on in those machines (in a functional way, if not the
| finer details). Then as we grew up the programming world
| became more complex, and we were able to track that
| complexity as it happened.
|
| I don't envy new programmers today who have to contend with
| vast complexity even to do the simplest of things.
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| I agree. The fact the 80s micros booted to BASIC put
| programming in front of you from the get go and subsequent
| machines hid programming away. The fact the machine came with a
| manual that was mostly about programming, they expected you to
| do that. If you wanted to play a game you often typed it in
| from a book (like the Usborne series). You tried to see if you
| could cheat or change the game by messing with the numbers
| which exposed you to tinkering with programming.
| mattbee wrote:
| _There are tons of children who could learn to program, could
| even teach themselves, but who are unaware that the option
| exists._
|
| This just isn't true, there are a billion ways into programming
| that there weren't in the 80s and 90s, and computers are
| cheaper too. Sure you don't get to tinker with your OS as
| casually but the scope of "learner" programming environments is
| so much greater. Even a keyboard isn't a necessity - look at
| the results from Dreams on the PS4. And Scratch is ubiquitous
| in (UK) schools, my son picked it up without any prompt from
| me.
|
| It might just feel like kids don't want to learn programming
| because most people don't want to learn, but most people (you
| know) are now _using_ computers compared to the 90s. So
| proportionally that is fewer computer users becoming
| programmers, even if numbers are going up!
| klodolph wrote:
| >> There are tons of children who could learn to program,
| could even teach themselves, but who are unaware that the
| option exists.
|
| > This just isn't true, [...]
|
| Let me get this straight... you're saying that children are
| generally aware that they can learn to program, and that
| children who aren't aware of these opportunities are rare or
| something?
|
| I must be misunderstanding something here, because that
| sounds like complete horseshit to me. I have years of
| experience teaching children how to program, and the vast
| majority show up unaware that learning to program is
| something within their reach.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The point is that these computers don't come with development
| tools installed by default and made available in the default
| environment. They don't provide any equivalent to the BASIC
| interpreters of old, or to the REPL of a Lisp Machine
| workstation. You can install e.g. Linux distributions that do
| provide the means to code and rebuild nearly any part of the
| installed system, but these are very much the exception not
| the rule.
|
| > And Scratch is ubiquitous in (UK) schools, my son picked it
| up without any prompt from me.
|
| Scratch is a huge downgrade from the likes of LOGO (a real
| LISP implementation, with a few syntactic conveniences to
| help novices) and even BASIC on the BBC Micro, which used to
| be taught in UK schools.
| ghaff wrote:
| >The point is that these computers don't come with
| development tools installed by default and made available
| in the default environment.
|
| I mean, Linux aside that's technically true. But, you got a
| BASIC interpreter that was pretty barebones even for the
| mid-80s in a PC of that era. And Turbo Pascal was a
| revelation when it came out because other "real"
| programming tools cost hundreds of dollars.
|
| But, today, for free, you can install any number of
| advanced programming languages and IDEs in about 10
| minutes. (And, on a Mac, Python at least comes pre-
| installed.)
| redwall_hp wrote:
| It's funny...because this is exactly me. When I was a kid
| circa 2000, I learned to program because I found one of
| these exact Usborne books at the local library. The idea
| that people who didn't work for Microsoft could develop
| software hadn't exactly occurred to me until I found that
| book and learned the basics. Of course, I didn't have a
| computer with a BASIC interpreter to run the listings, so I
| searched for more books and ended up porting the BASIC
| listings to JavaScript and running them in Internet
| Explorer 4. That also got me into learning how to build web
| pages by hand.
|
| There are more resources than ever if you already want to
| learn to program, but it's still hard to cross that
| threshold from _using_ computers to realizing that learning
| to program them is something approachable. Microsoft and
| Apple have both always promoted this sort of learned
| helplessness with their users, treating the GUI like a
| tangible thing and not providing obvious tools that
| encourage programming.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Microsoft Windows actually shipped with a BASIC
| interpreter in the IE4 days. And Apple had Hypercard.
| rwmj wrote:
| I think it was the immediacy combined with the lack of
| choice. The ZX81 "booted" into BASIC (in about 2 seconds),
| and there was nothing else to do. You programmed it or you
| asked your mum to take you to WHSmiths to spend more money
| than you had on a game which would take 15+ minutes to load
| from tape. I wasn't interested in games so I programmed
| instead.
| jll29 wrote:
| I had an interesting debate with a respected colleague at a
| British university about this once. My view was that
| teaching kids should be in a way that is "real", e.g.
| typing in Python code and not "toy" (e.g. Scratch) so that
|
| - they can get a feel for how real-life programmers work;
|
| - they can incrementally refine and build on what they know
| until they have picked up a very valuable (in terms of job
| market) skill
|
| I agree Scratch is sufficient to understand loops etc. but
| it doesn't "scale", i.e. at some point you need to switch
| over from Scratch to an "grown-up" language.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Python is actually a pretty bad language for novice
| coders, the programming model is _way_ too complicated
| and hard to get a feel for. I 'm not sure how people can
| even manage to "learn to code" via Python alone.
| antod wrote:
| I remember reading "Learning Python" in the 1.5 days and
| then a bit later properly using Python the 2.0 days. It
| seemed a lot simpler back then, and seemed like a clean
| powerful successor to the 8bit BASICs I started with. And
| nothing else at the time seemed to capture that clean
| easy on ramp to coding feeling, but still allowing you to
| go much further than eg an 8bit BASIC.
|
| Presumably if you limited which parts of the now massive
| 3.10 you exposed to newbies, you could still get the same
| result? The very basics haven't changed too much since
| 20+ yrs ago. I suppose the trouble is that any web
| searching is going send newbies off the tracks into
| advanced topics pretty quickly now, but that is still
| likely in just about any language.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Could someone link to a copy that doesn't require a google
| account to download? I tried with an older one I had and it
| demanded a telephone number, can you believe?
| ascorbic wrote:
| Ah, memories of carefully copying BASIC from these books. All
| Usborne books are great (and my kids love the current ones too)
| but these in particular were such a formative part of my learning
| to love coding, aged 8-10 or so.
| felixfurtak wrote:
| I remember as a kid having that Robot book and building it.
| Cutting out the balsa wood templates, mounting the motors. It
| worked pretty well, but I managed to destroy it pretty quickly
| when I tried actually make it move. My programming skills were
| never that great.
| AgentME wrote:
| As a kid in 1999ish in the US, my elementary school library had a
| book on computers that got me into programming, and I've been
| trying to find the book again since then. I think the book was
| just titled "Computers". The book had many pictures and diagrams
| about lots of computer-related things, but it definitely wasn't
| aimed at only young kids. Among many things, it talked about
| computers being used by NASA, it speculated about future
| computers and the internet (mostly as a future thing), and it
| also had classic diagrams of CPUs, logic gates, and the half-
| adder like out of college textbooks. I'd trace out copies of
| half-adders in my notebook and execute it on paper to see that it
| added numbers correctly. One page in an aside had a small example
| BASIC program that immediately got me obsessed with programming
| when I realized how simple it was to follow.
|
| In previous searches for the book, I found this site, and I
| realized the book had many similarities with the Usborne books,
| but I can't find it in any listing of them. I don't understand
| how, but the book "The Usborne Young Scientist: Computers" (1992)
| has some of the same content as the book I remember but it's
| missing a lot while also having some content I'm completely
| unfamiliar with. Maybe there was another lesser-known Usborne
| title that repackaged some of its content? If this sounds
| familiar at all to anyone, I have a few more notes on my memories
| and search for the book at
| https://tildes.net/~talk/is4/whats_one_thing_you_havent_been...
| and I'd appreciate any pointers.
| fipar wrote:
| For anyone else who may get a nicely-styled 404 in their native
| language:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220724171102/https://usborne.c...
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Thanks!
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| The link links to the us site at
| https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books . But the
| site sniffs my IP, rewrites the URL to a different country (
| https://usborne.com/nl/books/computer-and-coding-books ), and
| then 404s on that.
|
| Even if I _explicitly_ go to the /us/ url, it still rewrites the
| URL and makes it impossible for me to read the content. I
| literally can't look at the same content as someone from a
| different country, and there is thus no way for me to compare.
|
| Don't do that! IP sniffing is a terrible idea on a good day, but
| this is the worst. How is returning 404 ever the best choice
| here?
| julianz wrote:
| Mine redirects to their NZ site which still has the page, maybe
| try that one: https://usborne.com/nz/books/computer-and-coding-
| books
| adrian_b wrote:
| When clicking that link from another country of the European
| Union, I got a dialog box prompting me to select a country,
| with the country for my IP selected by default, but I was able
| to choose USA instead of the default.
|
| Then I could see the expected content. Maybe whether that
| dialog box is seen or not depends on the browser used and on
| its settings.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| That could be it. I'll try some different browsers and see.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I got that dialog box (having the "Welcome to Usborne"
| title) with both Chromium and Firefox, on Linux, but
| without having any ad blocker or script disabling, which
| could prevent the appearance of a dialog box.
| gpvos wrote:
| For me that happened only when I went to the home page
| _and_ turned off uBlock Origin for the domain (on latest
| Firefox).
| wslh wrote:
| It works but there is another detail. If you came from a
| country with a different language (e.g. Spanish) you should
| choose first the language and just then can select "United
| States".
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah, here in Argentina I also get a 404 error.
| kar1181 wrote:
| This is how I learned to program these books were so ubiquitous
| in the 80s even my (very_ rural Australian) school library had a
| few. I'm only had a Vic 20 so had to translate the listings that
| tended to be aimed at the c64.
|
| So many careers had their origin in these books.
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