Kinda off topic, but the MSX was amazing. We had one too, it was my first computer too. I vividly recall it came with two 200-odd page printed manuals, both in my native Dutch. One for MSX-DOS, which told you how to launch a word processor and print documents.
And one for MSX-BASIC. The manual, sent to every consumer's home, taught you what variables and subroutines were. It had pictures of jars with $A printed on the outside that you could put a 5 in and the later put a 6 in. In Dutch! In my home! I was 10. I was learning programming but I didn't know I was - I thought I was just learning the computer.
Years later my parents got me a "programming with superlogo" book and only then I discovered that I already knew how to program. That was pretty odd. <3 MSX and whichever Philips exec decided that consumers needed programming language manuals.
> I was learning programming but I didn't know I was - I thought I was just learning the computer
Back then these were not really separate concepts. Frankly, I don't think they should be nearly as separate concepts today either but nearly everyone making software seems to disagree.
One thing I hope will come out of a more code literate society (looks like a lot of high schools are teaching it now) is that, all software will be written assuming every user knows at least some scripting.
Often I clone a piece of software because I want to change just one thing, or even if it's open source I often need to set up a build environment etc... and I just wanna change like one integer!
> all software will be written assuming every user knows at least some scripting.
I don't know if that's what the answer is. I prefer the idea that computer usage naturally flows into computer programming. Take the most used programming environment in the world: Microsoft Excel. It can be used very simply as a table of words and numbers, but if you want to do more with it there are formulas, and when you reach the limit of that there's VBA. We used to have tools like HyperCard that allowed people to build simple GUI applications with no traditional programming language whatsoever, but also had one baked in for when you grew beyond the WYSIWYG editor's capabilities. That sort of thing basically no longer exists, and to the extent it does it is merely a copy of what existed before instead of an evolution.
> Often I clone a piece of software because I want to change just one thing, or even if it's open source I often need to set up a build environment etc... and I just wanna change like one integer!
Yeah, it'd be really great if more software was written with flexibility in mind. I want to have an API for interfacing with everything, I want to setup my own custom hotkeys, etc. I can kind of get there today with things like AutoHotKey, old Macs had AppleScript, Plan9... existed, but it is kind of ridiculous that this sort of thing isn't baked in to modern computing.
> Back then these were not really separate concepts.
That was not my impression. It did also ship with MSX-DOS, which very much wasn't a way to program the system. And, sure, BASIC let you launch programs and manage files, but it was cumbersome at best.
It's as if you get a Chromebook and it contains two manuals: one for Chrome ("how to open a web page") and one for the Devtools ("Chapter 1. HTTP")
> I vividly recall it came with two 200-odd page printed manuals, both in my native Dutch. One for MSX-DOS, which told you how to launch a word processor and print documents.
Ya, I still have that one :-) I ditched almost all my belongings a few years ago when I moved to New Zealand, but the MSX-BASIC book is one of the few non-essential things I kept :-)
And one for MSX-BASIC. The manual, sent to every consumer's home, taught you what variables and subroutines were. It had pictures of jars with $A printed on the outside that you could put a 5 in and the later put a 6 in. In Dutch! In my home! I was 10. I was learning programming but I didn't know I was - I thought I was just learning the computer.
Years later my parents got me a "programming with superlogo" book and only then I discovered that I already knew how to program. That was pretty odd. <3 MSX and whichever Philips exec decided that consumers needed programming language manuals.