Carmack’s Apple II inspires son — and reddit


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As reported by the Cult of Mac, id co-founder John Carmack recently tweeted a photo of his son learning to program on an Apple IIc:

This looks like the same IIc that Carmack received as a Christmas gift in 2012:

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/283632618946318336

The Apple II and education go hand-in-glove — this post is the site’s 18th to be tagged "education". However, the two sentences of the Cult of Mac’s story that struck me have little to do with education. First is this detail of Carmack’s origin story: "As a kid at Shawnee Mission East public school (one of the first in his family’s part of Kansas to get a computer lab), Carmack taught himself BASIC on an Apple II." Shawnee Mission is only 12 miles from Rockhurst University, home of KansasFest; might it be a homecoming to invite Carmack to be the event’s keynote speaker, joining his former colleague John Romero among the speaker alumni?

That paragraph’s next sentence is a wonderful example of unintended consequences: "Later on, [Carmack] bought an Apple IIGS to start his game-making career, as revealed in the fantastic book Masters of Doom." And it was that 2003 book book by David Kushner that inspired the 2005 founding of social news website reddit, as detailed by co-founder Alexis Ohanian:

… this book convinced me to consider starting a company. It just seemed like so much damn fun. Granted, we didn’t end up starting a gaming company (well, I guess we had ‘gamification’ before that was a buzzword: karma, leaderboards, awards, etc) but the idea a few friends could get together in a house and start building something the world had never seen before — having a lot of fun in the process — got me hooked.

Would reddit and its AMAs exist without Carmack and Romero — and thus without the Apple II? Likely not!

Who knows what the next generation of programmers will create and inspire, thanks to the Apple II?

(Hat tip to Steve Weyhrich)