DEV Community

Cover image for Which Childhood Gadget Ignited Your Coding Passion?

Which Childhood Gadget Ignited Your Coding Passion?

Ben Halpern on June 24, 2023

Let's take a trip down memory lane and share the tech gadgets or toys from our childhood that sparked our love for coding. Whether it was a classic...
Collapse
 
ryencode profile image
Ryan Brown

Initially an Apple][e basic starting at age 7, then it waned for a while. Then I seen a small public tv spot about kids making games with HyperCard on a Mac about age 11. Oh hey, we have that on our Mac LCII, and then it never stopped.

Collapse
 
vsaulis profile image
Vladas Saulis

Programmable calculator on dad's table with neon digits.

Collapse
 
montyharper profile image
Monty Harper

Image description

Collapse
 
schemetastic profile image
Schemetastic (Rodrigo) • Edited

A gadget? Not sure... but Sonic the Hedgehog video games make me learn programming in the Scratch platform because I wanted to create my own video games, however, I ended up loving more web design than video game design, haha.

Collapse
 
ganonbit profile image
Andrew Reese

Video Games I think originally sparked the curiosity in how they worked which led me to learn what coding even is. But also just having a old shitty family computer (I think first one we had was an older Win 95 eMachines gifted to us in early the 2000s) and trying to learn how it works by also deleting things I shouldnโ€™t trying to โ€œspeed it upโ€ ๐Ÿคฃ

Collapse
 
charanx profile image
Charan

It must be my Android tablet. It had a single-core CPU and 30 games installed on it. My cousin did something and my tablet got stuck in a boot loop. I asked a lot of people around me if they could fix it. Well, nobody understood computers better than I did, at that time (I was 11 years old!!!). It took me 2 years to fix it. But in the meantime, I got exposed to a lot of things like command prompts, terminals, Linux, batch files, websites, etc. And, that's how it all began.

Collapse
 
dyfet profile image
David Sugar

Making my first red box when I was 12. My first computer, a KIM-1, was still a year away...

Collapse
 
destynova profile image
Oisรญn

Red box for phreaking? Nice ๐Ÿ™‚

Collapse
 
dyfet profile image
David Sugar

I prefer the more euphemistic "telephone hobbyist" ;)

Collapse
 
calinzbaenen profile image
Calin Baenen

Technically the N64, but it wasn't the console itself.

I wanted to make a game at one point, Kitty Katty, that would be based off ov Banjo Kazooie; Banjo Kazooie, which originated on the Nintendo 64.
I liked the game, I also really liked Banjo Tooie for some its features, such as interconnected worlds, and the ability to split up and play with one or both characters; in turn, I wanted to make my own thing that was similar.

The result is what is now my fursona.

Collapse
 
rasjazz profile image
Jasmine Rasmussen

Not necessarily a gadget, but video games and Myspace both made me interested in code and front end development. I used to play around with Myspace themes and learned how to manipulate certain things just by messing around. I also was very interested in how people made mods for games and emulators, so that sparked my desire to learn programming.

Collapse
 
philipjohnbasile profile image
Philip John Basile

Checking out the source code to my games on my Apple ][ Plus

Collapse
 
clsource profile image
Camilo

A game magazine that has a small HTML tutorial in 1998

Collapse
 
taradev profile image
imtarajones

The family Pentium computer with an early version of Photoshop on it, making me wonder how the filters worked. I needed to learn to make my own!

Collapse
 
pinotattari profile image
Riccardo Bernardini

None. I am too old for that... I was 16 in 1980, when ZX 80 came out, I got my first home computer (a ZX Spectrum) few years later