19 ms·

My boys love 1986 computing

198 points by interesse 12y ago

bencollier49 12y ago
I completely agree with this. A lot of the games seem to appeal more too, because they've been written simply, with straightforward rules. The BBC Master (which my children love) was also a terrific platform to learn to program on. It's just a shame that a lot of the disk drives and disks haven't survived very well.
- timthorn 12y ago
  The Centre for Computing History runs school classes on BBC micros and Sinclair Spectrums which go down well with the children (& adults!) who take part: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/pages/12058/Schools/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/pages/12058/Schools/
scarygliders 12y ago
There is something about 1980's-era computers which make them so much more accessable to kids than today's systems. It's probably to do with how much simpler they are - if I can put my finger on it, I'd say it's because they don't have lots of Things which can tempt you to distraction; for example - if they had a web browser of some kind back then, you'd be tempted away from learning to program in BASIC, or learning how to load that simple-but-fun game. They generally were single task machines that allowed you to focus on one Thing. I'm looking at my Linux desktop right now on this machine. I have a web browser I'm using to type this reply. It also has 8 other tabs open - more tabs will be added later as I continue on my search for knowledge. I have a Konsole terminal open with IRC sessions to multiple servers and channels open. I have PyCharm loaded. I have a VM running, and more to run later. All vying for my time and energy. A child using this machine would be overwhelmed. Even a Raspberry Pi can distract the user of it in the same manner as my desktop. Perhaps it's time to reintroduce kids today to the CoCo2's, the VIC-20's, the C64's, the Spectrums, the ZX81's and so on. Perhaps getting kids to use single-task-at-a-time systems to learn instead of the distraction-inducing tech. of today, would be a very good idea. When my son was 2.5 years old, I put in front of him an ancient old Compaq laptop running Debian. It had Tuxpaint running on it, and I just put it in front of him and let him go on it. Within a short space of time he was using Tuxpaint like a "pro", and then he learned how to power the machine up, and type in his login name and password. Sure, you can do this with today's systems, but they do make it so easy to provide tons of distractions.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  Its the enormity of the abstractions that have to be embraced, in my opinion, which lead to distraction. There is much between a file and its handle. And thus: Far, far more words - real, English and/or Development-oriented words, symbols - exist in all the infinite abstractions of a typical Desktop machine; whereas the 8-bit worlds' abstract taxonomy is very sparse. There isn't really any good reason to throw away the 8-bit machines. They still work. And they still teach kids how computers work, even still today. I hope we see a return to this technology in a fashion that really compels people - young and old - to apply the ethos of those days, again. Distraction-free computing is one legacy of the earlier era.
- vidarh 12y ago
  I'm not so sure lack of distractions makes that much difference. I think on my C64 it was frequently the case that we'd switch games every few minutes. We were easily distracted with or without something specific to trigger it. But these computers were simple enough to "mess with" and get a mental model of the whole. By the time I was 7-8, I started "experimenting" with pulling chips out of sockets (to my parents horror) and seeing what happened if I put them in different places (...). If you even could have done that on modern machines with almost everything surface mounted, you'd fry stuff. With those old machines that was usually fairly hard. Amazingly, I never burned out any chips that way. The simplicity encouraged meddling with things in a way that is harder to see younger kids do with most modern computers: PCs are outright dangerous to let a young child dismantle on their own - whether or not you disconnect power (I'm afraid my C64's were more than once opened up while connected..); machines like the Raspberry Pi are simple and safe enough, but there's nothing to do inside them. Likewise for tablets and smart phones: If you manage to disconnect the display without breaking anything, you're pretty much at the limits. If you try to break into the black box as a child, you're faced with an image of something that is way beyond your comprehension. The C64 and similar home computers, on the other hand, had clearly labelled diagrams in their manuals that even a child could understand. You'd open it up, and you'd see what the different things were, and you could tinker (at least if you didn't tell your parents) and see the effects. It seems like it is harder to become "independent": Children learn a few "magic incantations" to get to the familiar things, and the knowledge required to bridge the gaps where exploration yields results that encourage further exploration seems higher. Or maybe that's what it looked like to our parents too. A few years older, I soldered wires straight onto the pins of the CPU of my Amiga. You could make a "pause" switch and reset button easily that way - you could solder it onto the bus exposed on the left hand side of the A500's too, but I had a hard drive attached there. Speaking of hard drives, considering the article mentions demonstrating floppy drives with the cover off, of course I did that with my 1541 drive for the C64 (and test what happened when moving the IO chips between the 1541 and the C64 - they're "almost" the same model; enough so that the C64 at least will run; same for the one from the Amiga - their differences are small enough to be inconsequential for most programs), but also with my first (20MB) hard drive out of necessity: I bought it used, and within 6 months it started having problems starting up. The solution? Open it up, and give the motor a helping hand spinning up the platter - after that it worked fine. The drive survived another two years I think after that.
willvarfar 12y ago
I initially gave my two girls an old desktop computer with a linux on it. They started to use it before I showed them how and they started figuring stuff out without me and soon I was sitting riveted in the background watching them discover things and trying to learn about computer UIs and work out how they thought. Here's an old blog post about it: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-tech-savvy-generation http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-te... - I think its a fun read. Fast forward to now; that blog post is hopelessly out of date! I gave them old-but-decent laptops and, eventually, internet access. As soon as they had internet access they stopped tinkering and exploring and started only using the laptop to watch repeat episodes of childrens TV. And now they often want to use their mum's iPad - to play music and watch TV - but they are completely utterly uninterested in tinkering with any PCs. Its sad but its true and I wish I knew what to do about it.
- scarygliders 12y ago
  See my post. You had the same experience as I had with my son. The old machines had less distractions - this is the problem with modern systems.
- yodsanklai 12y ago
  Unfortunately, this is true for adults too. I used to code for hours and now I have such a hard time to stay focused...
  - kalleboo 12y ago
    Just spent the past 3 weeks with my parents in their cabin 2 hours from civilization. Only internet connection is slow $60/4 GB 3G that's only stable in the early AM and late PM. Haven't been this productive in AGES.
    - jwilliams 12y ago
      Many (many) years ago I was using an IBM XT. It had come from Singapore and the HD wouldn't seek when it was cold – my theory was that it'd been formatted on a very hot and humid day and it couldn't track when it changed shape in the cold. Anyway. Big segue, but reminded me of that. If I had a task, I'd have to map it out on paper for an hour or two (while, I presume, the drive warmed up)... Don't think I've ever been as productive since!
yitchelle 12y ago
When my son was about four years old, I gave him an old electric typewriter which I got from Freecycle. I also gave him a stack of paper and some ink ribbon. Within days, he was "typing" away, loading new paper, working the lever to return the carriage to the start and replacing the ink ribbons. By the end of the month, it was in pieces as he tried to dismantle it to see out how it works. Luckily, I was supervising him so that he does not electrocute himself. The mind of a young child is an amazing thing to watch.
fit2rule 12y ago
My kids absolutely love our 8-bit rig!! Fire up some Defence Force, Harrier Attack, Doggy, or Zorgon's Revenge, from the good old days! YAY, 8-bit party! Space 1999, 1337, Pulsoids, Skool Daze .. STORMLORD! W00t! :) What's really great, is that the 8-bit days are not over. I see this now, with my kids getting attracted very much to programming on the 8-bit machines. "10 PING:WAIT 10 20 GOTO 10", represent!!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
amelius 12y ago
I love 1986 computing too! Everything was so simple. Just a single thread of execution to worry about. Then again, Javascript is also single-threaded essentially. Thus, from another point of view it looks like we're stuck in the 80s...
- Htsthbjig 12y ago
  The fact that we live in multiple thread environments does not mean that we have to use them. The same could be said about Internet, people say "there was no Internet distractions" when you could disconnect the network in any computer with a 3 seconds click. In fact what threads do is make your life easier. I did program a multimedia program in DOS using INTs and it was the definition of hell. Now you could make a simple audio thread, another simple picture animation thread and the more complicated thing you deal with is managing mutexes, that is super easy if you understand them.
  - ibebrett 12y ago
    multithreading programming is not "super easy." threads/parallelism give us power, but it definitely increased complexity and makes it harder to reason about the behavior of programs.
Zardoz84 12y ago
I remember my old good days with a Spectrum ... I learned basic maths with it...
zwieback 12y ago
Still have my Apple II in a box in the garage, hasn't seen any action in about 20 years. Maybe I should power it up and see if it still works...
- scarygliders 12y ago
  My Amiga 1200 is still working. I had souped it up with a VGA adapter, a 68040 card, amongst other things. I had to adapt a PC PSU to feed it the necessary power after that. It has been with me to Japan for 6 years. I forgot to reset the voltage from 110v to the UK's 240v and the magic white smoke from the capacitors escaped the PSU. But the Amiga itself survived to tell the tale and is working happily with the new PSU ;)
torgoguys 12y ago
Nice post. I loved my CoCo2 back in the day. I doubt their enthusiasm will last if they have alternatives, but it is fun to see the exploration, even if it is just for a little while. Planting the seed is important.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
Oh, nostalgic moments... I owned an Spectrum, Atari St, Amiga, and Apple II. I learned 68K assembler and BASIC on them, to load programs from tape... ...and I hated them and got rid of them as soon as I could. Seriously, I don't understand how people love to use floppy disk or tapes that sounds like the machine is doing coffee or something, takes minutes to load a single program, no 3D, no Internet, requires a TV that emits X rays, small and ugly. If I want my kids solving something hard, I will give them robots or 3D printers, not trying to force them to live the life that I lived 30 years ago.
Patrick_Devine 12y ago
Instead of burning a coaster, would it have worked to just play the .wav files out of the line-out jack on the more modern computer?
- jgoerzen 12y ago
  Yes. And in fact I tested it that way first. But with the CD route, I trust them with something that cost a few cents, and with an interface they already know (play, stop, and next track buttons). Way easier for them and far fewer consequences for trips or spilled water!
j45 12y ago
Great read. A big difference emerges in how young folks develop their skills are developed when spending one's time as a creating vs. consuming novelty/distraction in mindless screen time. We know the path of seeking/consuming novelty and distraction is a limited way of engaging both abstract and critical thinking skills when imagining how the hardware/software/network stack comes together. There's lots of studies on gaming (I was a voracious gamer until it got in the way of my creation and learning time), but I'd wonder if spending time in someone else's virtual worlds helps people get out there and solve real world problems. In a way, learning by seeing, and mastering a C64 is a timeless experience, only we don't have many C64's today as true, starter computers. It's where projects like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and others are so exciting, but there's little like seeing a physical floppy drive spin up and being witness to so many more steps in slow motion.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
This is great. When my daughter was 11 and wanted a 'computer for her room' I gave her a VAX[1]. She had a lot of fun learning a bit of C programming and playing advent and rogue. And I had realized that for me and my generation we had these very accessible computers of that time and my kids did not. I think some of that need is being met by RasPi's and Arduinos (look at how successful the Kano Kickstarter was [2]) When you talk about folks like Gates or Jobs or Woz or pretty much anyone from the early PC days, the stuff they "learned" on was pretty straight forward. Any high school kid could write a driver for an ISA card in DOS, that is certainly possible in Linux but I find the learning curve to be much higher. And without those little triumphs to keep you going it is hard to stick with it. [1] A VAX 4000/VLC which is a really compact and nice VAX, running netbsd. [2] http://www.kano.me/ http://www.kano.me/
- jgoerzen 12y ago
  "I gave her a VAX" made me smile. You are awesome.
sixothree 12y ago
You should get a CoCoSDC. It emulated floppy drives using disk images on an SD card.
- leoc 12y ago
  The http://www.sd2iec.co.uk/id14.html http://www.sd2iec.co.uk/id14.html SD2IEC does the same thing for Commodore disk drives.
Rabidgremlin 12y ago
I've been doing a similar thing with my 6 year old who wanted to learn to programming. I've been using JSBeeb (a browser based BBC Micro emulator) and have started to put together a Coding for Kids "book" based on our "lessons". It's still very rough and only partially complete but I'd appreciate any feedback http://c4k.rabidgremlin.com http://c4k.rabidgremlin.com
corysama 12y ago
I've long thought that the original GameBoy Advanced would make a great platform for kids to learn about hardware. Being solid state, it doesn't have the physicality that OP describes, but it does have a very understandable hardware and software model. Basically, 100% of the machine can be controlled via memory-mapped structs. No need to call a magical function from some Nintendo-sanction wizard. You can stomp the bits yourself and make stuff happen. I've written a toy program to draw on the screen in half a page of C. No includes, no libs. int main, vidmode=3, pixels[n]=255;
MichaelMoser123 12y ago
a similar story: David Brin got a C64 for his son, because he thought that would be a better tool for learning how to code. "Why Johny can't code" http://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/ http://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/
eah13 12y ago
This is part of something I hope takes hold in CS education: ontogenous education. Ontogeny is the study of the development of organisms throughout their lifecycle. Technology develops in a way that often makes the present as dissimilar from its roots as a caterpillar and butterfly. So by starting at the beginning (or a beginning at least), rather than the present we give kids a full grasp of why things are the way they are rather than the millions of other ways they could be. For many learners technology is a turn-off because it seems 'arbitrary'. It is, in the same sense that a biological organism or historical event is arbitrary. It's only with context that these things start to become intelligible. So ontogenous CS education is about giving a historical context to modern technology.
- mhjensen 12y ago
  I agree with this sentiment. Do you have any good recommendations for books on the history computer science? Lots of options available, but I'm looking for a technical overview of the subject.
  - eah13 12y ago
    In the beginning there was the command line (1999) is the best I know http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Stephenson-CommandLine-1999.pdf http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Stephenson-Comm... Happy to hear suggestions of others- I haven't found much and haven't looked lately.
    - mhjensen 12y ago
      I really enjoy reading Neal Stephenson, thanks for finding this!
ajross 12y ago
My six-year-old enjoys games on the Atari 800 I cleaned up for a collection 10 years ago. Lots of this stuff is pretty timeless.
thirdtruck 12y ago
This brings me back to my junior high days, when I bought a Centris 650 Mac at a yard sale for the express purpose of installing OpenBSD. That was my first real delve into open source operating systems, and it deserves much of the credit for my professional developer career.

198 points by interesse 12y ago

I completely agree with this. A lot of the games seem to appeal more too, because they've been written simply, with straightforward rules. The BBC Master (which my children love) was also a terrific platform to learn to program on. It's just a shame that a lot of the disk drives and disks haven't survived very well.

timthorn 12y ago
The Centre for Computing History runs school classes on BBC micros and Sinclair Spectrums which go down well with the children (& adults!) who take part: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/pages/12058/Schools/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/pages/12058/Schools/

scarygliders 12y ago

There is something about 1980's-era computers which make them so much more accessable to kids than today's systems. It's probably to do with how much simpler they are - if I can put my finger on it, I'd say it's because they don't have lots of Things which can tempt you to distraction; for example - if they had a web browser of some kind back then, you'd be tempted away from learning to program in BASIC, or learning how to load that simple-but-fun game. They generally were single task machines that allowed you to focus on one Thing. I'm looking at my Linux desktop right now on this machine. I have a web browser I'm using to type this reply. It also has 8 other tabs open - more tabs will be added later as I continue on my search for knowledge. I have a Konsole terminal open with IRC sessions to multiple servers and channels open. I have PyCharm loaded. I have a VM running, and more to run later. All vying for my time and energy. A child using this machine would be overwhelmed. Even a Raspberry Pi can distract the user of it in the same manner as my desktop. Perhaps it's time to reintroduce kids today to the CoCo2's, the VIC-20's, the C64's, the Spectrums, the ZX81's and so on. Perhaps getting kids to use single-task-at-a-time systems to learn instead of the distraction-inducing tech. of today, would be a very good idea. When my son was 2.5 years old, I put in front of him an ancient old Compaq laptop running Debian. It had Tuxpaint running on it, and I just put it in front of him and let him go on it. Within a short space of time he was using Tuxpaint like a "pro", and then he learned how to power the machine up, and type in his login name and password. Sure, you can do this with today's systems, but they do make it so easy to provide tons of distractions.

fit2rule 12y ago
Its the enormity of the abstractions that have to be embraced, in my opinion, which lead to distraction. There is much between a file and its handle. And thus: Far, far more words - real, English and/or Development-oriented words, symbols - exist in all the infinite abstractions of a typical Desktop machine; whereas the 8-bit worlds' abstract taxonomy is very sparse. There isn't really any good reason to throw away the 8-bit machines. They still work. And they still teach kids how computers work, even still today. I hope we see a return to this technology in a fashion that really compels people - young and old - to apply the ethos of those days, again. Distraction-free computing is one legacy of the earlier era.
vidarh 12y ago
I'm not so sure lack of distractions makes that much difference. I think on my C64 it was frequently the case that we'd switch games every few minutes. We were easily distracted with or without something specific to trigger it. But these computers were simple enough to "mess with" and get a mental model of the whole. By the time I was 7-8, I started "experimenting" with pulling chips out of sockets (to my parents horror) and seeing what happened if I put them in different places (...). If you even could have done that on modern machines with almost everything surface mounted, you'd fry stuff. With those old machines that was usually fairly hard. Amazingly, I never burned out any chips that way. The simplicity encouraged meddling with things in a way that is harder to see younger kids do with most modern computers: PCs are outright dangerous to let a young child dismantle on their own - whether or not you disconnect power (I'm afraid my C64's were more than once opened up while connected..); machines like the Raspberry Pi are simple and safe enough, but there's nothing to do inside them. Likewise for tablets and smart phones: If you manage to disconnect the display without breaking anything, you're pretty much at the limits. If you try to break into the black box as a child, you're faced with an image of something that is way beyond your comprehension. The C64 and similar home computers, on the other hand, had clearly labelled diagrams in their manuals that even a child could understand. You'd open it up, and you'd see what the different things were, and you could tinker (at least if you didn't tell your parents) and see the effects. It seems like it is harder to become "independent": Children learn a few "magic incantations" to get to the familiar things, and the knowledge required to bridge the gaps where exploration yields results that encourage further exploration seems higher. Or maybe that's what it looked like to our parents too. A few years older, I soldered wires straight onto the pins of the CPU of my Amiga. You could make a "pause" switch and reset button easily that way - you could solder it onto the bus exposed on the left hand side of the A500's too, but I had a hard drive attached there. Speaking of hard drives, considering the article mentions demonstrating floppy drives with the cover off, of course I did that with my 1541 drive for the C64 (and test what happened when moving the IO chips between the 1541 and the C64 - they're "almost" the same model; enough so that the C64 at least will run; same for the one from the Amiga - their differences are small enough to be inconsequential for most programs), but also with my first (20MB) hard drive out of necessity: I bought it used, and within 6 months it started having problems starting up. The solution? Open it up, and give the motor a helping hand spinning up the platter - after that it worked fine. The drive survived another two years I think after that.

willvarfar 12y ago

I initially gave my two girls an old desktop computer with a linux on it. They started to use it before I showed them how and they started figuring stuff out without me and soon I was sitting riveted in the background watching them discover things and trying to learn about computer UIs and work out how they thought. Here's an old blog post about it: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-tech-savvy-generation http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-te... - I think its a fun read. Fast forward to now; that blog post is hopelessly out of date! I gave them old-but-decent laptops and, eventually, internet access. As soon as they had internet access they stopped tinkering and exploring and started only using the laptop to watch repeat episodes of childrens TV. And now they often want to use their mum's iPad - to play music and watch TV - but they are completely utterly uninterested in tinkering with any PCs. Its sad but its true and I wish I knew what to do about it.

scarygliders 12y ago
See my post. You had the same experience as I had with my son. The old machines had less distractions - this is the problem with modern systems.
yodsanklai 12y ago
Unfortunately, this is true for adults too. I used to code for hours and now I have such a hard time to stay focused...
- kalleboo 12y ago
  Just spent the past 3 weeks with my parents in their cabin 2 hours from civilization. Only internet connection is slow $60/4 GB 3G that's only stable in the early AM and late PM. Haven't been this productive in AGES.
  - jwilliams 12y ago
    Many (many) years ago I was using an IBM XT. It had come from Singapore and the HD wouldn't seek when it was cold – my theory was that it'd been formatted on a very hot and humid day and it couldn't track when it changed shape in the cold. Anyway. Big segue, but reminded me of that. If I had a task, I'd have to map it out on paper for an hour or two (while, I presume, the drive warmed up)... Don't think I've ever been as productive since!

yitchelle 12y ago

When my son was about four years old, I gave him an old electric typewriter which I got from Freecycle. I also gave him a stack of paper and some ink ribbon. Within days, he was "typing" away, loading new paper, working the lever to return the carriage to the start and replacing the ink ribbons. By the end of the month, it was in pieces as he tried to dismantle it to see out how it works. Luckily, I was supervising him so that he does not electrocute himself. The mind of a young child is an amazing thing to watch.

fit2rule 12y ago

My kids absolutely love our 8-bit rig!! Fire up some Defence Force, Harrier Attack, Doggy, or Zorgon's Revenge, from the good old days! YAY, 8-bit party! Space 1999, 1337, Pulsoids, Skool Daze .. STORMLORD! W00t! :) What's really great, is that the 8-bit days are not over. I see this now, with my kids getting attracted very much to programming on the 8-bit machines. "10 PING:WAIT 10 20 GOTO 10", represent!!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

amelius 12y ago

I love 1986 computing too! Everything was so simple. Just a single thread of execution to worry about. Then again, Javascript is also single-threaded essentially. Thus, from another point of view it looks like we're stuck in the 80s...

Htsthbjig 12y ago
The fact that we live in multiple thread environments does not mean that we have to use them. The same could be said about Internet, people say "there was no Internet distractions" when you could disconnect the network in any computer with a 3 seconds click. In fact what threads do is make your life easier. I did program a multimedia program in DOS using INTs and it was the definition of hell. Now you could make a simple audio thread, another simple picture animation thread and the more complicated thing you deal with is managing mutexes, that is super easy if you understand them.
- ibebrett 12y ago
  multithreading programming is not "super easy." threads/parallelism give us power, but it definitely increased complexity and makes it harder to reason about the behavior of programs.

Zardoz84 12y ago

I remember my old good days with a Spectrum ... I learned basic maths with it...

zwieback 12y ago

Still have my Apple II in a box in the garage, hasn't seen any action in about 20 years. Maybe I should power it up and see if it still works...

scarygliders 12y ago
My Amiga 1200 is still working. I had souped it up with a VGA adapter, a 68040 card, amongst other things. I had to adapt a PC PSU to feed it the necessary power after that. It has been with me to Japan for 6 years. I forgot to reset the voltage from 110v to the UK's 240v and the magic white smoke from the capacitors escaped the PSU. But the Amiga itself survived to tell the tale and is working happily with the new PSU ;)

torgoguys 12y ago

Nice post. I loved my CoCo2 back in the day. I doubt their enthusiasm will last if they have alternatives, but it is fun to see the exploration, even if it is just for a little while. Planting the seed is important.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

Oh, nostalgic moments... I owned an Spectrum, Atari St, Amiga, and Apple II. I learned 68K assembler and BASIC on them, to load programs from tape... ...and I hated them and got rid of them as soon as I could. Seriously, I don't understand how people love to use floppy disk or tapes that sounds like the machine is doing coffee or something, takes minutes to load a single program, no 3D, no Internet, requires a TV that emits X rays, small and ugly. If I want my kids solving something hard, I will give them robots or 3D printers, not trying to force them to live the life that I lived 30 years ago.

Patrick_Devine 12y ago

Instead of burning a coaster, would it have worked to just play the .wav files out of the line-out jack on the more modern computer?

jgoerzen 12y ago
Yes. And in fact I tested it that way first. But with the CD route, I trust them with something that cost a few cents, and with an interface they already know (play, stop, and next track buttons). Way easier for them and far fewer consequences for trips or spilled water!

j45 12y ago

Great read. A big difference emerges in how young folks develop their skills are developed when spending one's time as a creating vs. consuming novelty/distraction in mindless screen time. We know the path of seeking/consuming novelty and distraction is a limited way of engaging both abstract and critical thinking skills when imagining how the hardware/software/network stack comes together. There's lots of studies on gaming (I was a voracious gamer until it got in the way of my creation and learning time), but I'd wonder if spending time in someone else's virtual worlds helps people get out there and solve real world problems. In a way, learning by seeing, and mastering a C64 is a timeless experience, only we don't have many C64's today as true, starter computers. It's where projects like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and others are so exciting, but there's little like seeing a physical floppy drive spin up and being witness to so many more steps in slow motion.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

This is great. When my daughter was 11 and wanted a 'computer for her room' I gave her a VAX[1]. She had a lot of fun learning a bit of C programming and playing advent and rogue. And I had realized that for me and my generation we had these very accessible computers of that time and my kids did not. I think some of that need is being met by RasPi's and Arduinos (look at how successful the Kano Kickstarter was [2]) When you talk about folks like Gates or Jobs or Woz or pretty much anyone from the early PC days, the stuff they "learned" on was pretty straight forward. Any high school kid could write a driver for an ISA card in DOS, that is certainly possible in Linux but I find the learning curve to be much higher. And without those little triumphs to keep you going it is hard to stick with it. [1] A VAX 4000/VLC which is a really compact and nice VAX, running netbsd. [2] http://www.kano.me/ http://www.kano.me/

jgoerzen 12y ago
"I gave her a VAX" made me smile. You are awesome.

sixothree 12y ago

You should get a CoCoSDC. It emulated floppy drives using disk images on an SD card.

leoc 12y ago
The http://www.sd2iec.co.uk/id14.html http://www.sd2iec.co.uk/id14.html SD2IEC does the same thing for Commodore disk drives.

Rabidgremlin 12y ago

I've been doing a similar thing with my 6 year old who wanted to learn to programming. I've been using JSBeeb (a browser based BBC Micro emulator) and have started to put together a Coding for Kids "book" based on our "lessons". It's still very rough and only partially complete but I'd appreciate any feedback http://c4k.rabidgremlin.com http://c4k.rabidgremlin.com

corysama 12y ago

I've long thought that the original GameBoy Advanced would make a great platform for kids to learn about hardware. Being solid state, it doesn't have the physicality that OP describes, but it does have a very understandable hardware and software model. Basically, 100% of the machine can be controlled via memory-mapped structs. No need to call a magical function from some Nintendo-sanction wizard. You can stomp the bits yourself and make stuff happen. I've written a toy program to draw on the screen in half a page of C. No includes, no libs. int main, vidmode=3, pixels[n]=255;

MichaelMoser123 12y ago

a similar story: David Brin got a C64 for his son, because he thought that would be a better tool for learning how to code. "Why Johny can't code" http://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/ http://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/

eah13 12y ago

This is part of something I hope takes hold in CS education: ontogenous education. Ontogeny is the study of the development of organisms throughout their lifecycle. Technology develops in a way that often makes the present as dissimilar from its roots as a caterpillar and butterfly. So by starting at the beginning (or a beginning at least), rather than the present we give kids a full grasp of why things are the way they are rather than the millions of other ways they could be. For many learners technology is a turn-off because it seems 'arbitrary'. It is, in the same sense that a biological organism or historical event is arbitrary. It's only with context that these things start to become intelligible. So ontogenous CS education is about giving a historical context to modern technology.

mhjensen 12y ago
I agree with this sentiment. Do you have any good recommendations for books on the history computer science? Lots of options available, but I'm looking for a technical overview of the subject.
- eah13 12y ago
  In the beginning there was the command line (1999) is the best I know http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Stephenson-CommandLine-1999.pdf http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Stephenson-Comm... Happy to hear suggestions of others- I haven't found much and haven't looked lately.
  - mhjensen 12y ago
    I really enjoy reading Neal Stephenson, thanks for finding this!

ajross 12y ago

My six-year-old enjoys games on the Atari 800 I cleaned up for a collection 10 years ago. Lots of this stuff is pretty timeless.

thirdtruck 12y ago

This brings me back to my junior high days, when I bought a Centris 650 Mac at a yard sale for the express purpose of installing OpenBSD. That was my first real delve into open source operating systems, and it deserves much of the credit for my professional developer career.