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For what it's worth, I recall reading that Bill Gates didn't allow his children to have smartphones until they were like 13. Not that he's a model of perfect pa
by warent 7y ago
For what it's worth, I recall reading that Bill Gates didn't allow his children to have smartphones until they were like 13. Not that he's a model of perfect parenting but just an interesting example given his relationship to technology. I'm not convinced that an 8 year old who is interested in web development will suffer from not having the device--there's a million other things they could be learning/doing. In fact I would hypothesize that the smartphone would actually cause a young brain to grow into the habit of having a miniscule attention span.
- andai 7y agoIf I wanted to raise my kids to be good with computers, I'd give them machines from the 80s. For a start, you can program them. (My smartphones make me sad for this reason.) Further, you have to program them to get them to do much of anything. To play a game, you have to type it in! Which means you can type in something different, and make your own games! They always come with a manual. And they are beyond the reach of the tentacles of the attention harvesting monster.
- bobthepanda 7y agoHow many machines from the ‘80s are still working, or have parts available?
- non-entity 7y agoA ton, the vintage computer section on eBay is filled with C64s and ZX Spectrums. I just picked up an IBM 5155 I'm having fun hacking with.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoI just played textual Oregon trail on a working mainframe from the 1970s at the living computer museum in seattle. I think you can teletype in if you want.
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- rascul 7y agoI think you would need to go back a little farther than the '80s. The Apple IIe made playing Oregon Trail approximately as easy as inserting the floppy disk. You could also play Microsoft Flight Simulator without much work on your 386 running MS-DOS.
- shaneprrlt 7y agoNah, just stick em in the broom closet with an iPad open to youtube on autoplay. They'll be composing symphonies in no time. Lmao
- Cougher 7y agoTo each his own, but I would absolutely not do this. If I were to try to teach my kids car maintenance, I'm not going to insist that they learn to adjust the points under a distributor cap.
- elfexec 7y agoThat seems like overkill. Why not just give them a barebones linux box with tty only. No X server, no windows manager, just a cursor blinking at you, daring you to do something. As a christmas present you could install lynx for them.
- NewsAware 7y agoFor Easter they get the vowel keys you previously removed
- nixpulvis 7y agoNot from the 80's but I have an X1 Carbon, and I could give this to someone with only the default frame buffer and a POSIX shell, and that would work. Probably would need to install a firmware password at some point... but it's not completely trivial to learn how to install an OS. If the user can figure out how to install chrome to get to Facebook (or whatever) from just that, well I think they're probably past this line of reasoning. I can't do this what any mainstream smartphone however, ffs.