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Thinking back, there was a noticable difference between the computers I "played" with and those I treated more carefully: whether they had persistent storage (H
by chriswarbo 8y ago
Thinking back, there was a noticable difference between the computers I "played" with and those I treated more carefully: whether they had persistent storage (HD) containing reasonably important data.
Without persistent storage, it was quite liberating to know that I couldn't really "break" things, since the default state would be restored by a reboot.
Maybe it's an advantage for a learning machine to have the system/OS be read-only (maybe with a physical switch to allow writes) and have data saved to removable media (e.g. microSD)? There's no way to mess up someone's data if it's kept outside the machine.
- scj 8y agoI was thinking a ROM chip that copies contents to RAM. That way you can modify the built-in functionality while only being a reboot away from a perfect reset. But I'd also want saving to be through an external card that can be modified by a regular computer.
- stcredzero 8y agoThinking back, there was a noticable difference between the computers I "played" with and those I treated more carefully Smalltalk environments try to capture some of this spirit. If you do something really bad, you just re-start the image and replay the change log, leaving off the last entry.