The high cost of software in the 1980s (2019)
A common sentiment on HN (and other programming-centric communities) is nostalgia for early computing days, and specifically, how easy it was to become a programmer. You turned on your Commodore and it booted into a BASIC prompt, for example. No webpack&#x2F;babel&#x2F;toolchain nightmare between you and making a computer do things.<p>But as someone who started programming as a kid in the late 80s&#x2F;early 90s, I think this nostalgia vastly understates how many barriers existed between enjoying doing things in BASIC and moving forward to different levels or paradigms of programming. I was made vaguely aware of the existence of C by computing magazines, but the idea of actually buying a C compiler was totally out of the question. My high school had Pascal available, but nothing else.<p>It wasn&#x27;t until the mid-to-late 90s that the internet and open source evolved to the point where programming languages and tools became ubiquitous to the point where you stopped thinking about how you might acquire them.