5 ms·

So amazing. I wonder if it's possible to manufacture that sort of limitation nowadays. Not sure if I would even want to!

m_mueller 12y ago
Why not. This is pretty much my game plan if/when I have kids: Start them off with a raspberry pi or similar, a keyboard and a monitor, then gradually explore with them and add more gizmos and software together. Some of my fondest memories as a child was playing around on my father's old IBM mainframe workstation computer with two 5 1/5 inch floppies as a three to five year old. At that age I really didn't need much, seeing something happen on a screen after some keypresses and some analog sounds coming from the floppy drive was enough magic for me. I'm thinking that giving a child an iPad at that age could be really damaging - there's just no sense of wonder and accomplishment outside the prepared paths anymore.
- increment_i 12y ago
  That doesn't add up to me. The children of today will almost surely look back at the iPad the same way you look back at your dad's IBM mainframe and with the same nostalgia as others on this thread. It'll seem quite primitive compared to the contemporary technology of their adulthood.
  - m_mueller 12y ago
    Here's the big difference: You can't 'play' around with them the same way, they're not built to program on or change / break things significantly. It's not an empowering device.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - peteridah 12y ago
    I bought a kano/raspberry kit for my 5yr old. We explore the terminal, python interpreter, minecraft etc and he is totally pumped, with the ipad lying idly just by his side. What really clicked for him was the fact that he now had a real computer that did stuff like dad's and calls himself a 'real hacker'.
- aethertap 12y ago
  I'm doing pretty much that right now with my 5-year-old daughter with a raspberry pi. She can currently boot it up and check her email by herself (using claws-mail). One of the big things that I think we can do today that wasn't really available when I was a kid is robotics. For a couple hundred bucks and some time invested, you can make a robot platform for them to play with and get them playing with super low-level stuff without any kind of pretense (limiting her to just the r-pi with a BASIC repl would be pretty artificial in today's world, but the state of hobby robotics now is much like the state of computing was 25 years ago). I'm working on a robot repl right now so that she can get the instant feedback like we had with BASIC, but it's slow going for lack of time. The thing I've found interesting is how she goes back and forth between the r-pi and the iPhone pretty seamlessly. I don't think she realizes that they're fundamentally similar devices. To her the iPhone is just a black box with some fun games on it, but the r-pi is a lot more like an adventure.
  - anei 12y ago
    This is amazing what you're doing for her. I wish someone did something like that for me but as a girl I was usually discouraged from pursuing science, computers, physics or anything like that. I am sure she will appreciate it all when she's older.
lukaslalinsky 12y ago
I think the limitations are not main reason why these 8-bit computers produced many good programmers. It's the fact that they booted straight to BASIC. In many cases, that was all you had. That invited people to start experimenting. My parents were also poor, I learned BASIC without having access to a computer except for one hour a week at school, I didn't have my own computer until many years later, I was fixing other people's computers to earn money to get components for my computer, I didn't have access to internet until around 2000, so I was learning from outdated books. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I didn't have those limitations. Anyway, Raspberry Pi is definitely the closest thing to the experience now. You boot up the default image and you have access to a lot of programming tools. You even get to peek/poke memory to access the GPIO pins, but you have to do it as root these days. :)
- prezjordan 12y ago
  I like your hypothesis. Maybe I'll campaign to get BASIC material on Khan Academy ;) Only semi-kidding.
  - empressplay 12y ago
    We're developing a BASIC interpreter called retRUNner that's (initially) Applesoft compatible, but will have modern graphics and sound capabilities so users (kids, mostly) will be able to play games like Woz's original Breakout (we have a collection of over 400 listings we'll be shipping with it) and upgrade them to 3D, add art, music, sound effects and so on. So we're teaching a bit of history along with some coding skills. Down the road we're going to add additional 'dialects' such as Apple LOGO, and Atari, Sinclair and Commodore BASICs, but the Apple II version will be out soon -- I'll be sure to mention it on here when we release it =)
    - prezjordan 12y ago
      So cool! Happy to give you early feedback if you so wish. Best of luck with the project.
    - ddingus 12y ago
pkaye 12y ago
I still see tight hardware constraints now. Until '10 I was working at a company that made flash CF cards which used 8-bit processors. 32K of SRAM and 64K of code space with bank switching. Every clock cycled mattered. Hand coded division operations. 32-bit integers are a luxury. Even wrote some self modifying code for an inner loop that boosted performance by 25%. Nowadays that company is using ARM processors but you still hit constraints (usually memory) not seen on PCs and servers.
- mkramlich 12y ago
  as I've gotten older I've increasingly wondered if I should make the jump (back, technically) to low-level programming. working on those highly constrained devices, every cycle matters, every bit, every watt, etc. because that's where I started as a kid and think it would give me a market advantage over the younger generation who've grown up with supercomputers in their pockets, a dozen high-level languages to choose from, frameworks for everything, tutorials and videos for everything, and not really having to worry about performance or resource usage like "we" used to have to do just to make anything work at all.
  - pkaye 12y ago
    Yeah low-level programming was why I have been working on firmware for a long time. But working on truly resource constrained systems can get old. Instead of really solving the problem at hand, you have to work on quirks and idiosyncrasies. I'm glad that we are now working on 32-bit processors.
    - lgieron 12y ago
      > Instead of really solving the problem at hand, you have to work on quirks and idiosyncrasies. FWIW, I work in Big Data and feel the same way :)
ibrahima 12y ago
A lot of kids probably get started programming with TI-BASIC on their TI83s/84s or whatever they have these days.
ldng 12y ago
I think today's microcontroller are more similar at spec level. So programming Arduino-like is a maybe today's equivalent. Hum, maybe I'm stretching a bit here.

m_mueller 12y ago

Why not. This is pretty much my game plan if/when I have kids: Start them off with a raspberry pi or similar, a keyboard and a monitor, then gradually explore with them and add more gizmos and software together. Some of my fondest memories as a child was playing around on my father's old IBM mainframe workstation computer with two 5 1/5 inch floppies as a three to five year old. At that age I really didn't need much, seeing something happen on a screen after some keypresses and some analog sounds coming from the floppy drive was enough magic for me. I'm thinking that giving a child an iPad at that age could be really damaging - there's just no sense of wonder and accomplishment outside the prepared paths anymore.

increment_i 12y ago
That doesn't add up to me. The children of today will almost surely look back at the iPad the same way you look back at your dad's IBM mainframe and with the same nostalgia as others on this thread. It'll seem quite primitive compared to the contemporary technology of their adulthood.
- m_mueller 12y ago
  Here's the big difference: You can't 'play' around with them the same way, they're not built to program on or change / break things significantly. It's not an empowering device.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- peteridah 12y ago
  I bought a kano/raspberry kit for my 5yr old. We explore the terminal, python interpreter, minecraft etc and he is totally pumped, with the ipad lying idly just by his side. What really clicked for him was the fact that he now had a real computer that did stuff like dad's and calls himself a 'real hacker'.
aethertap 12y ago
I'm doing pretty much that right now with my 5-year-old daughter with a raspberry pi. She can currently boot it up and check her email by herself (using claws-mail). One of the big things that I think we can do today that wasn't really available when I was a kid is robotics. For a couple hundred bucks and some time invested, you can make a robot platform for them to play with and get them playing with super low-level stuff without any kind of pretense (limiting her to just the r-pi with a BASIC repl would be pretty artificial in today's world, but the state of hobby robotics now is much like the state of computing was 25 years ago). I'm working on a robot repl right now so that she can get the instant feedback like we had with BASIC, but it's slow going for lack of time. The thing I've found interesting is how she goes back and forth between the r-pi and the iPhone pretty seamlessly. I don't think she realizes that they're fundamentally similar devices. To her the iPhone is just a black box with some fun games on it, but the r-pi is a lot more like an adventure.
- anei 12y ago
  This is amazing what you're doing for her. I wish someone did something like that for me but as a girl I was usually discouraged from pursuing science, computers, physics or anything like that. I am sure she will appreciate it all when she's older.

lukaslalinsky 12y ago

I think the limitations are not main reason why these 8-bit computers produced many good programmers. It's the fact that they booted straight to BASIC. In many cases, that was all you had. That invited people to start experimenting. My parents were also poor, I learned BASIC without having access to a computer except for one hour a week at school, I didn't have my own computer until many years later, I was fixing other people's computers to earn money to get components for my computer, I didn't have access to internet until around 2000, so I was learning from outdated books. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I didn't have those limitations. Anyway, Raspberry Pi is definitely the closest thing to the experience now. You boot up the default image and you have access to a lot of programming tools. You even get to peek/poke memory to access the GPIO pins, but you have to do it as root these days. :)

prezjordan 12y ago
I like your hypothesis. Maybe I'll campaign to get BASIC material on Khan Academy ;) Only semi-kidding.
- empressplay 12y ago
  We're developing a BASIC interpreter called retRUNner that's (initially) Applesoft compatible, but will have modern graphics and sound capabilities so users (kids, mostly) will be able to play games like Woz's original Breakout (we have a collection of over 400 listings we'll be shipping with it) and upgrade them to 3D, add art, music, sound effects and so on. So we're teaching a bit of history along with some coding skills. Down the road we're going to add additional 'dialects' such as Apple LOGO, and Atari, Sinclair and Commodore BASICs, but the Apple II version will be out soon -- I'll be sure to mention it on here when we release it =)
  - prezjordan 12y ago
    So cool! Happy to give you early feedback if you so wish. Best of luck with the project.
  - ddingus 12y ago

pkaye 12y ago

I still see tight hardware constraints now. Until '10 I was working at a company that made flash CF cards which used 8-bit processors. 32K of SRAM and 64K of code space with bank switching. Every clock cycled mattered. Hand coded division operations. 32-bit integers are a luxury. Even wrote some self modifying code for an inner loop that boosted performance by 25%. Nowadays that company is using ARM processors but you still hit constraints (usually memory) not seen on PCs and servers.

mkramlich 12y ago
as I've gotten older I've increasingly wondered if I should make the jump (back, technically) to low-level programming. working on those highly constrained devices, every cycle matters, every bit, every watt, etc. because that's where I started as a kid and think it would give me a market advantage over the younger generation who've grown up with supercomputers in their pockets, a dozen high-level languages to choose from, frameworks for everything, tutorials and videos for everything, and not really having to worry about performance or resource usage like "we" used to have to do just to make anything work at all.
- pkaye 12y ago
  Yeah low-level programming was why I have been working on firmware for a long time. But working on truly resource constrained systems can get old. Instead of really solving the problem at hand, you have to work on quirks and idiosyncrasies. I'm glad that we are now working on 32-bit processors.
  - lgieron 12y ago
    > Instead of really solving the problem at hand, you have to work on quirks and idiosyncrasies. FWIW, I work in Big Data and feel the same way :)

ibrahima 12y ago

A lot of kids probably get started programming with TI-BASIC on their TI83s/84s or whatever they have these days.

ldng 12y ago

I think today's microcontroller are more similar at spec level. So programming Arduino-like is a maybe today's equivalent. Hum, maybe I'm stretching a bit here.