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Comment by cube00 | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why Microsoft didn't have affordable licences to encourage kids to program.

The school computer lab had Visual Basic but you only got an hour week in there as part of the computing subject, the school library computers couldn't have it because the licence was per seat not per site.

You really only had QBASIC which was great but we really wanted to write Windows apps. You'd be up for a thousand dollars for a MSDN academic subscription just to get Visual Basic.

I guess the blessing was instead of Windows apps we made web pages and JavaScript games hosted on our parents ISP webhost accounts while we dreamed of the day we'd have enough money to buy our own .com domain.

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People forget how locked down the systems were until Borland and finally GNU gcc entered the market (Unless you went Masm or Pascal.) I remember the MS visual C++ and VB manuals with compilers were over $8k/seat at one point (would be almost twice that in today dollars).

People sometimes underestimate how important search engines are to build applications without official documentation.

Supporting FOSS is more than a convenience for some, as most remember locked ecosystems were not fun at any age. I remember GW-Basic and VB3.0 made building programs easy for kids, but it had other issues besides the license cost. Prior to Visual studio, making standalone binaries was simply too difficult for most until the Internet.

Now the average AAA game is around 40GiB on Steam, and g++/clang is the standard tool-suites. Fun times, =3

Most people either pirated Visual C/C++ or got GNU/Linux with tons of devel packages and amateur books (Learn C as if you were a freshman in College) or something like that.

I was very lucky that once I'd outgrown QBasic, my father could get me a copy of Visual Studio 6.0 while it was current, because he worked at the major University in our state and could access it through their campus-wide MSDN subscription.

I played with Visual Basic at the start but was keen to learn C++ because I had heard it was used in systems programming (I had the dream of developing my own operating system). A bit later on I did stumble on homebrew OS dev and started using DJGPP (a Windows port of GCC) but having access to Visual C++ was a very important step!

I started my computing life on BBC Model B machines, which simply came with BASIC builtin, no license required. It was immediately apparent to me that there was something odd happening with operating systems that required you to pay extra to be able to write software.

40 years later, and I've successfully managed to never use a Microsoft product.

They were too busy taking BASIC away from others:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

In my day adults were clueless on tech. Not like there was anyone to teach programming when they could barely turn on their computer. Hopefully it's better now in that.

...because Sales is busy with bombing schools with CoPilot & MS365 subscriptions and Sales Guys does not have this in their crosshair: They could create a much bigger and earlier addiction to MS products if they would enforce coding-for-kids-activities in schools and colleges :)

Copilot and MS365 have some API areas that no one outside MS actually knows what they do.

Day 2 task was cleaning our Win11 Steam game install drive:

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI (when it works)

Day 1 task installing Win11 Pro in offline-mode without TPM/Bitlocker speeds up the benchmarks a bit for a game system:

https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/releases

Fun times, but most of the Win experience has always been removing garbage code/adware/shovel-ware. =3

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