Kids computers

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Thu Mar 9 18:10:04 2000

On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 02:17:56PM -0800, Mike Ford wrote:
> Once they are through the basics though, figure on a fairly new system with
> a good graphics board. Run all the older software in emulation, plus surf
> the web and play games with decent speed.

Hmm, I think a *vital* factor for a machine which is truly intended to
educate kids, is that it must be absolutely no use at playing video games.
I'm not kidding, make 'em talk to it through an ASR33 if you have to, because
once you lose them to video games they'll never be more than just users.

I don't know who's going to be writing software in the future because I don't
see the slightest inkling of the right kind of curiousity in any of the kids
I know.

Also, I know this is flame bait, but: I don't think it's *ever* too early
to expose kids to assembly language. It's really frightening the way we have
people these days who pass themselves off as "computer" programmers, but they
don't actually know the first thing about computers. All they know is the
foggy world that you get when you slather a veneer of C over everything.
The kids in the C and Pascal courses I took in school had a really hard
time grasping the concepts of pointers and structures, but everybody got it
immediately when the same things were covered in assembly language class.
I'm really glad I took that one first, the teacher was a maniac! Not that I
hadn't done assembly language before, but he had us write a mini-editor and
a mini-assembler and most of a Lisp interpreter and all kinds of other stuff,
all in an 8-week summer session, it was wonderful... And all the HLL stuff
was easy after that.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Thu Mar 09 2000 - 18:10:04 GMT