Computer education

From: Max Eskin <max82_at_surfree.com>
Date: Sat Mar 6 13:26:50 1999

Hi folks,
Today was the first day of my free networking course at school, at the end
of which I will have received a certificate 'n stuff...anyway, the guy was
trying to explain layered protocol stacks, and data abstraction. It
occured to me that the concepts have no meaning outside the realm of
developing the protocols or applications that use these protocols. And
it's almost impossible to explain without referring to these realms. The
guy was telling us how 'everything in the computer is in binary' but you
need additional network layers 'because Word can't understand the binary
and needs it to be translated'. At this time, I was thinking about my
recent experiences with the PDP-8. I wonder, wouldn't it make everything
so much easier if every computer in schools had a PDP-8 emulator on it,
and students had to learn to make simple programs in PAL before learning
concepts like the OSI 7-layer model, etc? Because, it was obvious that
the guy was being forced to avoid saying the word 'function' or
'subroutine' since people didn't know what it meant....

--Max Eskin (max82_at_surfree.com)
Received on Sat Mar 06 1999 - 13:26:50 GMT