
My boys love 1986 computing - interesse
http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9269-my-boys-love-1986-computing
======
willvarfar
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-
te...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-tech-savvy-
generation) \- 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Fast forward to now; that blog post is hopelessly out of date!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.

~~~
bunderbunder
I've seriously considered setting up an old-fashioned automatic timer to
control the power going to our DSL modem so that our Internet service is only
available for an hour or so out of every day.

My worry, though, is that I'd be unplugging the modem from the timer and
hooking it directly into the wall whenever I work from home, and that'd be a
slippery slope to just having it hooked up all the time again.

~~~
indiv0
If your router supports Tomato[1], dd-wrt[2], open-wrt[3], or similarly
featured firmware, you might have a feature to restrict access at certain
times of the day based on MAC address.

This would allow you to work from home, while restricting access for your
children.

The only issue I might see with this setup is if your work-from-home PC is the
same as the one the rest of your family uses to access the internet.

[1]: [http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato](http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato)

[2]: [https://secure.dd-wrt.com/site/](https://secure.dd-wrt.com/site/)

[3]: [https://openwrt.org/](https://openwrt.org/)

------
scarygliders
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.

~~~
vidarh
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.

~~~
mnw21cam
That hard drive probably had "sticktion", where the read/write head sticks to
the platter surface, preventing the motor from spinning the drive up. It can
happen if you leave a hard drive running for a while and then shut it down
without allowing it to park its head.

Modern hard drives are clever enough to park the head when they detect the
power supply turning off, so it hasn't been such a problem recently.

The recommended solution for sticktion is to lift the comptuter (or hard
drive, if it is separate) about an inch off the desk, and let go.

~~~
scarygliders
When I was a Customer Support Engineer for SGI way back, I had to swap out a
load of IBM drives on lots of SGI kit at various customer locations due to
this, which was dubbed "The IBM Stiction Problem".

Power off --> remove drive --> Sharply tap the drive on desk --> replace drive
+ add new drive --> clone

The look on customer faces at the "Sharply tap the drive on desk" stage was as
priceless as the data on the hard drive B)

~~~
mnw21cam
A while back, my workplace had a medium-sized disc array. That is, something
like a hundred UW-SCSI 72GB drives, arranged into about twelve different
RAID-5 sets. When we had to power it down because of scheduled electrical work
in the building, about eight of the drives failed to come up again. It's a
miracle none of the RAID-5 sets were broken. Hard drives don't like being
switched off if they have been going for a couple of years.

And that is why RAID is no substitute for backups, people. A reasonable
proportion of events that will take out a hard drive will take out more than
one.

------
ChuckMcM
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
"I gave her a VAX" made me smile. You are awesome.

------
yitchelle
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.

------
eah13
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
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
In the beginning there was the command line (1999) is the best I know
[http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Stephenson-
Comm...](http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Stephenson-
CommandLine-1999.pdf)

Happy to hear suggestions of others- I haven't found much and haven't looked
lately.

~~~
mhjensen
I really enjoy reading Neal Stephenson, thanks for finding this!

------
bencollier49
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
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/)

------
Rabidgremlin
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)

------
fit2rule
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!!

------
j45
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.

------
corysama
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;

------
Htsthbjig
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.

------
amelius
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
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
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.

------
thirdtruck
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.

------
torgoguys
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.

------
zwieback
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
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 ;)

------
Patrick_Devine
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
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!

------
ajross
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.

------
MichaelMoser123
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/)

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

~~~
leoc
The [http://www.sd2iec.co.uk/id14.html](http://www.sd2iec.co.uk/id14.html)
SD2IEC does the same thing for Commodore disk drives.

------
Zardoz84
I remember my old good days with a Spectrum ... I learned basic maths with
it...

