I produced a transcript by my Leisure Electronics contribution by re-giving the presentation to my iPhone assistant Siri, fixing the transcription errors, and finally send it through Language Tools. The result can be found under Programming and Becoming - Transcript. I didn’t have a text to read from but I still wanted to preserve the presentation, since I had the feeling I could expand on it.
Another question (besides “When did tinkering become programming?”) that I took with from the conference was, what is the larger theoretical/critical context that my dissertation is embedded within. So I tried to assemble some more crucial readings/approaches that could help frame me my dissertation through the synopsis as well as started to create a general Blinded by the Light - Map.
How do we conceptualize programming? A brief look at the psychology of coding results in the insight that most of that kind of research focuses on optimization and business processes: how to keep programmers motivated, how to reduce friction in teams, what are efficient ways of cutting up tasks, and so on.
So many questions popping up.
Is the dipp in released video games in the late 1980ies and indication of the change from tinkering to a proffesionalisation?
What did the tinkering in the 1980ies do for the understanding and formation of a computational subject?
How important was community for the sustaining of memory regarding early video game history? It seems that the demoscene was well organized and able to early on archive their cultures. Not so much the dispersed and fragmented people that tinkered early on.