Hey, fellow computer professionals! Were your parents like this?

In My Humble Opinion
1

You know how these days parents try to limit their children’s computer and Internet access, time spent playing computer games, all that stuff?

Were you one of those kids who stuck with it and made it into your career? I think it’s so horrible when parents automatically think computers and web surfing and games are evil and will get a child nowhere. I started out doing web design and experimenting with Photoshop and such because back in the day everyone and their dog that played video games had their own Geocities/Angelfire/Tripod/Crosswinds site. I came to love it so much I do it for a living now, almost 7 years after my first crappy site.

Any other techies laugh in the face of ‘you are wasting your life on that computer!’?

(caveat: yeah, I know, there’s such a thing as too much and for quite a while I was at that point, but I managed to walk away and get a life too)

2

There was no internet when I was a kid. Our family computer was a Commodore 64. :slight_smile:

I’m not a computer professional in the way that you mean, but I document software for a living and I decided that it counts. grin

3

My Dad used to bring metal cases full of punchcards home from the office. That’s as close to a Personal Computer as we had.

4

My parents did try to limit computer time (Commodore 64), and I did stick with it. But this hasn’t gotten me anywhere, because I pretty much still just play games and stuff.

5

Learned to code basic by experimenting with the computers in the lab of the junior college that my mom attended, I was 13 and had no where to go and you can only play so many games of solitaire. Have been doing it ever since. And yes I was a total junkie. I wasn’t allowed to have internet access until I was in college. Mom thought i would spend all day looking up internet porn, and she was probably right.

6

Well, I think there’s a bit of a difference. Example: my husband saved up and bought his own Atari 800 when he was 10. He started coding in Basic as well as playing video games. He liked to write his own programs, stuck with that, and is now running a software startup. His brothers liked playing video games, but they weren’t interested in coding and doing stuff like that, and they have followed different career paths. One brother failed a university class or two because he played too much Master of Orion.

The difference is that some kids will always want to do something creative on the computer, and some will only want to play games or surf the Internet. And it really is something of a waste of time if you just play Warcraft for days on end. I think there are probably too many kids fooled into thinking that they can actually get glamorous jobs writing video games or designing web pages if they play enough and go to ITT Tech or something.

My mom would never buy us a video game system, not a single Atari 2600 or Nintendo. Some of us saved up to buy our own. But the one with a career in software design didn’t spend all his time playing video games–he spent a lot of it tinkering and doing his own stuff too (and bugging my husband, when we got married).

Also we had lots of punch cards around the house when I was a kid, too. :slight_smile:

7

My mother complained when I spent the entire school holiday writing my interpretation of Tailgunner on the Commodore PET that my dad had somehow appropriated from work. Her complaint was that I should (a) contribute to the general upkeep of the household in some way and (b) have a life, like a normal person. She was right. Still, Tailgunner on a Commodore PET, that’s something isn’t it?

8

My mom told me not to sit too close to our black & white TV or I would go blind.

9

A good friend of mine has two sons. He was always on their ass to stop wasting time on computer games. One of them is a programmer at a computer game company and just got recruited to a very promising start-up. The other has his own company with a few employees. They write music for computer games for one of the largest and most well known game companies.

10

My parents gave me $500 when I was 12 to buy a computer with. My two main choices were a TRS-80 and no software, or a Vic-20 and a couple games. I went for the Vic-20.

I spent the next couple years typing in BASIC code from Compute! magazine and taught myself how to code. By the time I got to college, I was far too hip to do any of that computer stuff for real, so studied stuff like English Lit and Ancient Greek and paid my rent by doing coding and IT work.

So now, twenty years later, I’m still paying the rent with that “computer stuff.” My parents never tried to restrict me, and I’m convinced that my early exposure to computers and programming is why it comes so easy to me. Mr. Athena has a degree in computer science and more years of experience than I do (we met when he was my boss), but in our house I’m the tech person - I fix the computers, I set up the network, he comes to me when he needs to know about a new technology.

So yeah, parents, let your kids play with the computer. It’s a good thing.

11

I got an abacus!

12

Computer use was encouraged. When I was 15-16, I wanted to build one with my own money, but was worried my parents wouldn’t let me. They were glad that I wanted to do such a thing. They were never restrictive about my interest and use of computers, thank goodness.

13

My first computer class was one I paid for myself: my parents saw it as “a waste of time.” I was in 11th grade. Of course, forget about studying anything computer-related (CompSci was vocational school, which my parents saw as “below university”, plus the aforementioned waste of time notion).

My major, Chemical Engineering, required a research or design “project” (thesis). My task was to write a series of computer programs in Basic which the Stats teacher needed; in Basic because they had to be usable in any computer a student had access to. For the first three months my parents had me going to Dad’s office after hours to do the work - as you can imagine, this was slower than an arthritic turtle. They didn’t even want to let me buy a computer, again with the mentality that it was a timesink. Finally I got one, second hand from a friend whose family was upgrading.

A month after I got the second-hander, my parents bought the latest model for my brother - who “needed it for draftsmanship”. It’s one of those wounds that bleed forever… there wasn’t money for a secondhander for my Og-damned thesis, but ah, if you have a dick there’s one more zero available for a 101 class.

The thesis had to be defended in front of a three-teacher “jury”. After the defense, the defender and guests leave the room while the jury decides on the grade. While we waited for the grade, Dad asked me “you did all that?” “well, yeah, what did you think I’d been doing, sitting on the computer day and night like I wanted it to hatch?” “oh, I thought you were playing games…”

I ended up in IT consulting because, as we say in Spanish, “a goat will always find a mountain that needs climbing.” It sure wasn’t due to parental prodding :stuck_out_tongue:

14

I’m way too old for that problem. I first met a computer in high school, which was programmable in machine language only. I did stay late to hack on it. However, my father did tell me to take some business classes in college to fall back on - when I was a CS major.

hajario, your example sounds just like the kid who plays basketball all the time and gets into the NBA. While it happens, for each kid who plays games and gets in the industry there are 10,000 who don’t. If a kid is writing macros and playing with Javascript, then I’d not consider any time on the computer excessive. But in general playing computer games will no more ready you for a CS job than it will for a processor design job.

15

Yeah, but many parents, like mine, have no idea what is it their children are doing with the computer - and do not really care to learn about it. There’s both the ones who think their kid would never look at porn and those who think that writing a computer programming thesis can be done on SimCity… in either case, no comunication or observation skills.

16

My parents encouraged me to use the computer.

My dad has always been “into” computers. Transitioned to building and messing with PCs when CB radios got boring, I think. They bought our first family PC in…1989, I think. He used CAD for work, so it was a practical, if extravagent, purchase. We had some games, but what captured my tiny mind was this (really crappy by my standards now) program called Splash. It had simple bitmap brushes and type, and a paintbucket, and patterns that could be painted with the brushes, and stamps, and various color palettes, and sample files with elaborate faces and landscapes. I was entranced. Not long after I discovered this wonder, I saw an episode of Reading Rainbow that showed a guy coloring in a dragon’s eye with a pen for a mouse!! (ZOMG!1!!) I had to have one. I vowed, one day, that would be my job.

Throughout the years, we upgraded systems and drawing programs, but Splash still has a special place in my heart.

I now work as a graphic designer and own a Wacom tablet, purchased for me by my Most Thoughtful HusbandTM. My career choice was * profoundly* influenced by playing on the computer as a child. My husband is a software engineer and reports much the same experience with parents and computers, but related to making menus in BASIC instead of birthday cards in a graphics program.

My parents didn’t really worry about what I spent my free time doing. During my free time, I was usually reading, drawing, playing a computer game, or messing with whatever drawing program we had on our computer. I’d say between the time I was 6 and 18, I spent about 8 to 15 free hours on the computer per week.

They weren’t worried that it was frying my brain or anything. Sometimes in the summer, my mom would yell at me to go outside and play, but never specifically for one pastime or another. I think they figured my feral cousins would put enough sunshine and dirt in my diet. (Of course, I come from a family where my grandmother’s favorite video games are Zelda: A Link to the Past and Mortal Kombat, but who would play Commander Keen with me when I was 10. Why yes, that is a tangent, and yes, she is fun, and yes, I am bragging.)

17

Never had that problem. They did try and limit my use of the slate though.

18

My parents strongarmed me into using the computer to type all my school reports. This was 1987, and it was a bizarre little Amstrad PCW (Personal Computer/Wordprocessor.) My brother taught himself to code pretty well on it, and they never discouraged him. I used to trade him - we were allowed computer time in return for doing dishes. I didn’t wash a dish all one summer. But my parents eventually cracked down and insisted I spend time on the computer. I learned the basics of How Stuff Works, including using a mark up language to do all the formatting on the word processing stuff. There was no mouse, gui, or hard drive. My parents were not keen on excuses about not wanting to learn or use it - they were early adopters for our area, and eventually I built my first (horrible geocities) website because if I didn’t get it done, my parents would have a website before I did.

I don’t work in IT, but I do earn my living making stuff that used to happen on paper happen on screen, and being comfortable picking up and learning new software is key to my job. I also program a bit, albeit in the weirdass SAS language, which is not at all like applications development or other types of programming. I credit my parents’ insistence that I get comfortable using a computer with my relative fearlessness at jumping into new technical environments.

19

Heh heh … my parents didn’t exactly limit my time on the computer, but my dad (who owns his own construction company) always insisted that computers were just a fad, and I get the impression that even now he doesn’t think much of people who work with software for a living. I’m graduating in May with a degree in computer science, and he’s asked me several times “Do you ever think about getting a degree in civil engineering?” I think in his mind, writing software isn’t something “real” like building something is.

20

Actually I think that’s true for huge numbers of people, including business folks who want to buy software and even some businessy managers of software companies. It doesn’t take up space, and to them it looks like magic, so they have no comprehension of the planning and extensive amount of work it takes to produce a good software program. So they think they can ask for a new project to be finished in 6 months and they can change the specs constantly and it will still work–it’s magic, after all, it isn’t real.