These letters matter a lot to kids. I sent my video game idea to Nintendo as a little kid and I had the same reaction seeing that envelope from Nintendo in the mailbox addressed to me. I think it was also a bit more special pre-internet as these companies felt a bit more magical and mysterious. You can only read about them through video game magazines and see their names in the credit scenes at the end of the games. Unless you were one of those weird kids that called Nintendo Power helpline of course!
When I was thirteen I sent an email to Tom Fulp (creator of Newgrounds.com) telling him I wanted to make my own website with Coldfusion (which I had learned about through a pirated copy of DreamWeaver) and MySQL, and asked if would help me make it. [1]
He responded back extremely politely and said that my idea seems like a great idea, but he's far too busy running Newgrounds to build any other websites right now, but once I build it he would love to see it.
I never ended up building the website, but I look back and think it was cool how encouraging he was to some random kid who emailed him.
Kids will pick the weirdest people as "heroes" sometimes, and it's cool when your heroes turn out to be decent humans. Sometimes just responding to an email is all it takes.
[1] I honestly do not remember at all what the website was supposed to be and I don't have the email anymore. Knowing thirteen year old me, it was probably a forum about Donkey Kong Country or something.
My job entails me writing mostly Coldfusion all day long.
I write new code in Coldfusion script. Its syntax heavily inspired by javascript, right down to the optional terminating semicolon.
I still have to support a fair bit of code written in Coldfusion tag syntax. That I dislike especially given the code base was written by amateur developers and just makes me feel like bad php from 2003.
Oh I am very familiar with Coldfusion. My first job after dropping out of college [1] was doing Flash and Coldfusion work for a Martial Arts management company.
I have very mixed feeling on the language as a whole, both the tag and script language, though they’re mostly negative nowadays. I joined the CFML Slack a few months ago, which I was surprised to find, and the people on there were very nice and I respected their passion for the platform, but I personally still find the language pretty irritating, even with the scripty version.
Granted, I am very removed from web stuff now, and mostly work in data-land.
[1] I have a degree now, but that came considerably later.
Six year old me sent an idea to McDonnell Douglas for an airplane with turboprops to back up the jets in case of engine fire. There was also a fire suppression system. They sent me some nice brochures about the DC-8, -9, and -10, but looking back on it they could have mentioned that the jets are already redundant and will usually stop burning when the fuel is cut.
I hope they at least acknowledge that it was quite impressive for a six year old to understand the distinction between different types of engine and consider engine fires.
Anyway, YC's Heart Aerospace's intended commercial airframe design now does use a turboprop as a backup (for range extension beyond the capabilities of their battery electric engine), so six year old you was clearly onto something :)
Teenage me sent a letter to a US airline maintenance department asking why they don't put a one-directional fin on the landing gear tires to cause them to rotate in the air, so they wouldn't create as much smoke when they contact the runway. I don't remember what the reason was, but they wrote me back so I appreciated it.
I so much wish we could all get together as engineers and make a site where kids can write to and send videos etc on and we just praise them and tell them their ideas are good as a community.
i will never stop finding it weird when American software developers/IT people call themselves 'Engineers'. I am actually an 'Engineer' in the UK and it's a very different term here that basically implies someone who works on physical projects, in CAD or by hand. i am also a software developer...but in my experience software developers often make very bad 'engineers' as we would define the term just because they're not very practical/don't have a STEM background etc.
In the UK we even have protected and quite difficult to achieve things like 'chartered engineer' which similar to 'chartered accountant' etc originates from royal charter but it carries with it ethical and legal implications etc. You need a STEM degree and 6 years relevant professional experience before you can even consider applying lol. I am not chartered but have worked with many CEng engineers.
It is easily the weirdest thing about HN that Americans seem to equate writing code/handling infrastructure to designing eg Superyachts or Peristaltic pumps - 2 things I've done as an 'engineer'!
Engineering in general to me just means 'designed' by specification per an area study. Whether software or hardware/industrial application. I know UK is all about titles though as if they're 'worth' something. A lot of stuff we use in modern day was made by someone who claimed to be an engineer but was really a hobbyist on to something.
That said in the US there are some specifications of a license engineer that you have to earn. Electrical/Petroleum/Nuclear/Structural etc those areas do have licensing associated that is different state by state. The main issue with software engineering is it forgoes that completely there just wasn't time to make a process about it. It was/is always about time to market.
I think that's a different thing. Yes it's a possibility. I'm just saying a site where say there's a group of engineers/scientist that are just there to listen and praise. No judging No competition just a place to keep kids interested and not dither away their creativity watching other kids play roblox on youtube.
In 1997 I typed up a letter to Maxis in Microsoft Creative Writer about how much I liked their games and wanted to move to America and work at Maxis when I grew up:
Unfortunately I made the mistake of mentioning that it'd be cool if you could print out an image of your city in SimCity 2000, as you could in the previous SimCity game. That was enough to get me only this letter from legal as a response:
Since there doesn't seem to be any record in the Internet by the way, this is what printed cities looked like in SimCity 1 (these are my own scans of some printouts from 1996):
Presumably they are implying that if they read creative suggestions, they open themselves to the possibility of being sued if they ever implemented anything similar to what was suggested. Doesn't sound too complicated to explain to a kid.
I always thought the catch-22 was funny where they say they saw that I was suggesting an idea ¾ of the way through the letter, so they chose to return the letter without reading it.
Fair enough. I think I cracked the case though: they probably have someone who isn't "them" read the letters though, a third party like another law firm or some contractor that offers that service specifically.
I wasn't joking. I don't think that was a form letter. I think someone took the time to write a personalized, thoughtful letter to a wide-eyed 10-year old.
Pretty terrible in my experience. The good stuff for kids mostly moved to tablets and phones, but no keyboard and mouse is a limiting format, and you have to sift through a hundred bad apps to find the good one. Not much that runs easily on modern PCs comes close to the old magic. Though Tux Paint is actually very good, retaining the sense of whimsy that most modern software lacks.
It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing. Like in the 80s and 90s people were trying to make things that were fun and interesting and probably based on their life experiences. And now they're trying to make things that are the best distillation of whatever was most successful before. But that makes it feel dishonest, corporate.
Even Microsoft in the 90s could still make stuff that felt fun and unique. There was a counterpart to Creative Writer called Fine Artist that was equally good.
>>It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing.
Miyazaki had a line in a documentary I watched a couple years ago which is now only a vague echo in my mind and I am struggling to search for it, but the gist of it was that early animators had an appreciation and an eye for people, the world, real movement of real bodies, whether reflected in cinema or just in everyday life, while later, he said, were raised on animation, so the product is a second-order imitation.
The same must be true with software. Early painting/desktop publishing/presentation software retains a link to how those things were done with your hands and scissors and paint brushes, trying to fit them into the screen for the first time, to be used by someone who might not have used a computer before. Now it’s a foregone conclusion that you’ll be working on the computer, and nobody involved had ever flipped through a literal book of clip art or made a slideshow on transparent paper.
This is a timely post. Just last night my 8 y/o asked if she could create a presentation on my laptop like they do at school. I have no idea what software they use at the elementary school.
I've let her play around with Google Docs before. But what I really wanted was something like Creative Writer that is more kid friendly. I used Gemini (sorry) to suggest some software and it suggested "Book Creator" which is intended for schools/teachers. I signed up as a fake teacher and added my kids as students and they did create some really creative books, importing images, and adding their own drawings. But it's still missing that kid-friendly vibe like Creative Writer.
Check out Canva. It might even be what they're using at school already. It doesn't have the simplicity and fun of the old stuff, but it's intuitive to use even for kids. A lot of features where they're broken convention in ways that actually make more sense than the standard, for example resizing images keeps the aspect ratio by default instead of stretching.
you can get a lifetime fan just by replying to a letter - like you see here. That's a very effective marketing.
I got a rejection letter once from a company I submitted my resume to (online) and I still remember that and in a positive light even though it was a rejection.
Now they just ghost you even if you went through 5 rounds of interviews and spend a bunch of your time.
Probably a smart move. Writing and mailing a letter takes a lot more time and effort than a phone call or comment online. If a person took the time to write a letter, they're probably worth taking the time to respond to.
I don't have a cool story about sending a letter as a kid, although I had drafted one to send to Lego, but have been on the receiving end before. My office is across the street from an elementary school that we have a relationship with, evidenced by the annual trick or treat we host for them. One day roughly every third cubicle or so had a letter at the desk from one of the kids with a cute note. It was clear that our leadership provided the names and we weren't looked up, because mine had my nickname. Anyway, even though it was clearly a class assignment, it was really neat, and I made a reply with official company letterhead and everything in hopes of making the day of the kid who wrote me. Turns out that other peers had the same idea, because when I went to leadership to ask how to return it to the kid (I didn't know his classroom or anything. Just a first name and school address), they had letters from several other employees that they were going to return to the school.
Back then the working class was simply more powerful. Companies had to have good PR, hence feeling 'magical' or 'mysterious.' Of course now in the later stage of capitalism, these execs, investors, etc can just do full-on mask slips.
I think some of this is definitely childhood nostalgia, but its also very different world today. I don't know any kid that sees Nintendo as magical as I did. The Legend of Zelda was this weird, dark, and mysterious thing. So many games were oddly mysterious or weirdly ported from places like Japan, which had their own design language and often the translation was odd which only added to the mystique. Games came out with little to no fanfare and you just had to sort of figure them out. There were cheat books and magazines and such, but generally you had to approach this art with an open heart and open mind and sort of drink it in. If everything is a google or AI search away, then there's no real mystery anymore.
Kids today are forced to be savvy and 'realpolitick' at a young age. They just complain about the pricing and more 'inside baseball' about games and absolutely get a little brain fried by youtube gaming culture that often runs on outrage so no game is good enough. Suddenly, everyone is a critic and magic and love are hard to cultivate in a highly critical environment. Its like everyone is stuck in a Philosophy 101 class with an overly argumentative professor, forever, and its unrelenting and makes us miserable.
Also kids aren't ignorant, in fact they can be very savvy. Games constantly begging them to buy DLCs or sell them microtransaction items absolutely hurt the 'magic.' How can you develop these feelings when you feel like you're locked in the room with a shady used car salesman constantly?
I don't know if kids today can even experience that old magic. At least not in games. It seems now its only in books and getting lost in novels where magic exists now. A book can't beg you to buy an extra chapter or make you pay gems for the next sentence.
I disagree actually. There certainly are games that I have felt are pretty 'magical' as you put it but they tend to me almost childlike in some of their design choices. Monument Valley for example was amazing. I was so impressed by that game and how it mixed the childishness of magic toyboxes and Escher inspired puzzles with the adult complexity of some of the puzzles and the eeriness of the setting.
"Of course now in the later stage of capitalism, these execs, investors, etc can just do full-on mask slips."
Just a reminder: we've supposedly been in/near late/end stage capitalism for over a hundred and fifty years now. Marx was proposing this back at the end of the nineteenth century.
I think starting in the 30s and esp after WW2/cold war era helped reset it somewhat. It started to pick back up in the 80s and into overdrive with the internet
In sixth grade language arts class we wrote letters and there were rumors that some companies, if you sent them letters saying you liked their product would send you coupons for free candy/chips/soda/etc.
We did Flat Stanley in second grade[1, circa ~2000], including mailing him to someone to send him on an adventure. I sent my Stanley off to Volkswagen and he came back bearing little toy pull-back VW Beetles and smelled like a new car…
We went down a different path. We used to write to chocolate companies and they would send us free stickers etc. They advertised the product of course but it was fun.
I remember also receiving that weird VHS tape from Nintendo in the mail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzIc_c1PvE
I have no idea how I received that, but it was so cool!