Author: Bruno Oliveira (@btco)

Growing up in the late 80s, there was nothing quite so magical as a computer. Even unicorns, which really existed for a while back then, were completely ignored and disappeared as our eyes were all glued to our shiny 386s IBM PCs with their 16 colors and dozens of megabytes of hard drive space. Computers weren’t (yet) like Hollywood or Netflix where you’d just sit and watch content. “Entertain me, machine!” I commanded as I plugged it in, yet it just replied humbly with “C:\>”. What does one reply to this cryptic, yet wonderful exhortation? I was supposed to type commands, direct it, program it. I was supposed to make things.

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3D + Geocities + BASIC = ?

So, this brings me to why I quit my well-paid tech job after 11 years, and went off to build Rooms.xyz with my colleagues Jason Toff and Nick Kruge. Jason had the original idea to allow people to make “rooms” in 3D, to try to tap into the magic of Geocities in the 90s.

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Then I thought: what better place and opportunity than this one, to also tap into the magic of BASIC? There was of course the fear that putting coding into the mix was going to make it complicated or intimidating. But that’s one thing that irks me: why do so many people think code is complicated and intimidating? People who want to learn programming are constantly kept back from it by “wiser” people who think “no, we shouldn’t show them code yet! They will run away! Here, go play with these little visual twinkly squeaky logical blocks. ” And then they invent some kind of programming-substitute system that’s full of incomprehensible visual metaphors and weird little wires and colors. Anyone who has tried to do anything beyond the basics in such systems quickly realizes it’s way more limited, and also harder than programming, not easier.