4 ms·

True. Mixing emulation in would probably save a lot of work and resources. I feel like having to do things like manually punch up your programs on cards and man

True. Mixing emulation in would probably save a lot of work and resources. I feel like having to do things like manually punch up your programs on cards and manage with tiny amounts of storage would be a great experience and really force students to work towards elegant solutions. I love getting my Dad talking about some of the labs he's worked in over his career and kind of wish I could get a sense of how much has changed over such a short time.

jerf 9y ago
The other nice thing about emulation is that you get to use modern IO hardware, particularly keyboards. I can imagine having fun programming on a Commodore 64; I have a much harder time imagining having fun doing it with an actual Commodore 64. The keyboards were not all that great by modern standards when they were brand new, don't get better with age, and certainly don't get better in a student lab environment :)
flyinghamster 9y ago
At my high school circa 1980, the introductory computer course (on a PDP-11/34 running RSTS/E) had us write our first BASIC programs onto mark-sense cards (the same size and shape as punch cards, but you marked them with a pencil). I recall a field for the line number, another for a keyword (pick from a list), and then the remaining part of the card was for variables and operators. After a couple go-rounds with that, we were then allowed to use the terminals, mostly Visual 200, with a few VT100s, an LA36, and an LA120. The Visual 200 wasn't a particularly good terminal; it seems there was always at least one out of order at any given time. It's kind of scary that a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero is much faster and has vastly more RAM than the 11/34, which cost well north of $100K back then. Not to mention that there was a grand total of 28 MB of storage on that 11/34 in the form of two RK07 disk packs - you could fit thousands of RK07 images on a single 64 GB MicroSD card.

jerf 9y ago

The other nice thing about emulation is that you get to use modern IO hardware, particularly keyboards. I can imagine having fun programming on a Commodore 64; I have a much harder time imagining having fun doing it with an actual Commodore 64. The keyboards were not all that great by modern standards when they were brand new, don't get better with age, and certainly don't get better in a student lab environment :)

flyinghamster 9y ago

At my high school circa 1980, the introductory computer course (on a PDP-11/34 running RSTS/E) had us write our first BASIC programs onto mark-sense cards (the same size and shape as punch cards, but you marked them with a pencil). I recall a field for the line number, another for a keyword (pick from a list), and then the remaining part of the card was for variables and operators. After a couple go-rounds with that, we were then allowed to use the terminals, mostly Visual 200, with a few VT100s, an LA36, and an LA120. The Visual 200 wasn't a particularly good terminal; it seems there was always at least one out of order at any given time. It's kind of scary that a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero is much faster and has vastly more RAM than the 11/34, which cost well north of $100K back then. Not to mention that there was a grand total of 28 MB of storage on that 11/34 in the form of two RK07 disk packs - you could fit thousands of RK07 images on a single 64 GB MicroSD card.