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I used to write BASIC programs on paper as a child before I had access to a computer. There are plenty of algorithms you can learn without a computer too, and

I used to write BASIC programs on paper as a child before I had access to a computer. There are plenty of algorithms you can learn without a computer too, and carry out on paper. I have no idea what kind of things are allowed in prisons - would a microcontroller running a simple interpreter coupled with a small LCD and keypad be allowed? If so, something like that would be really great for applying programming concepts.

bmj1 10y ago
As a teenager, my dad confiscated my laptop in the run-up to exams. Unperturbed, I wrote pages & pages of BASIC by hand, though I unfortunately never got around to typing them up...
acqq 10y ago
The magic is very old: in the earlier generations, from the students of my university, some never had the opportunity to actually run their programs directly on the university computer. They just punched the cards, gave them to the "operator" and received the resulting printouts. That were the old times: as the "bandwidth" was limited, everybody was motivated to check as much as possible before executing only once. "Processing in your head" was very important and people were really careful. It was nevertheless, or maybe exactly because it was so, "addictive." Richard Feynman, about one early example: "“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine. After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation. Absolutely useless. We had tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.”"

bmj1 10y ago

As a teenager, my dad confiscated my laptop in the run-up to exams. Unperturbed, I wrote pages & pages of BASIC by hand, though I unfortunately never got around to typing them up...

acqq 10y ago

The magic is very old: in the earlier generations, from the students of my university, some never had the opportunity to actually run their programs directly on the university computer. They just punched the cards, gave them to the "operator" and received the resulting printouts. That were the old times: as the "bandwidth" was limited, everybody was motivated to check as much as possible before executing only once. "Processing in your head" was very important and people were really careful. It was nevertheless, or maybe exactly because it was so, "addictive." Richard Feynman, about one early example: "“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine. After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation. Absolutely useless. We had tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.”"