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My boys love 1986 computing

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Re: My boys love 1986 computing

#31

Post by JoshTriplett »

nekopa wrote: post #19
willvarfar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attempts to reason with them or ban internet have just met with stroppiness. Its like they have moved from being creators to being consumers.

Maybe attempt to work with their consumption. I they like watching kids TV shows online, show them how to download the videos and edit them. Maybe they can cut out parts they find boring at first, then move onto making a best of version from a season to eventually remixing the shows into something completely new. There's some fairly decent and easy video editing software nowadays - all drag and drop - that could be f…

> Maybe attempt to work with their consumption. I they like watching kids TV shows online, show them how to download the videos and edit them.

For instance, show them some of the better abridged series, and suggest that they make their own.

Re: My boys love 1986 computing

#32

Post by 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.

Re: My boys love 1986 computing

#33

Post by vidarh »

mnw21cam wrote: post #17
vidarh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hor…

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 reco…

Maybe. What I maybe didn't make clear, though, was that this wasn't a one off thing: I had to manually spin it up every time I turned it on. After the first couple of times I didn't bother screwing the cover back on, and occasionally I'd leave it off to show friends...

Re: My boys love 1986 computing

#34

Post by scarygliders »

zwieback wrote: post #29

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...

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 ;)

Re: My boys love 1986 computing

#35

Post by bunderbunder »

willvarfar wrote: post #4

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... - I…

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.

Re: My boys love 1986 computing

#36

Post by 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.

Re: My boys love 1986 computing

#37

Post by Htsthbjig »

amelius wrote: post #25

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...

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.

Re: My boys love 1986 computing

#39

Post by mnw21cam »

scarygliders wrote: post #18
mnw21cam wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reco…

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…

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.

Re: My boys love 1986 computing

#40

Post by k-mcgrady »

crististm wrote: post #28
willvarfar wrote: post #4

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... - I…

I suspect internet access is what kills the joy of real work since you can be so easily distracted. Before you know it, one hour has passed and you didn't do anything. I'm beginning to see a solution in a separate computer just for Internet access, as PG suggested several years ago. The one for work should just redirect everything to localhost or not have network access at all.

>> "I suspect internet access is what kills the joy of real work since you can be so easily distracted. Before you know it, one hour has passed and you didn't do anything."

I wonder if another part of the problem is that you can see other people's work online and give up when you see your achievements pale in comparison. I remember writing my first app - a web browser in VB - and when I did it I spent weeks working out how to copy and paste and create a menu bar etc. I even got joy from figuring out how to create a splash screen and create themes for my app. It was using a built in webview so there nothing very complicated about it but I had to read documentation and figure stuff out and it took quite a long time. I was very proud when it was finished. I can't imagine my feeling would be the same now. I could Google it, find the answer - ready to copy in to Visual Studio and run - and I would feel stupid for spending weeks on it. Then I would see someone who built a framework used by thousands of people on a weekend and I'd want to give up for good.

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