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Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?
21–30 of 244 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hardware is the easy part. It's the software that's the tricky part. That Apple II software was something a 5 year old could have fun with, which a REPL would be hard to do. It had enough rails to be usable but enough user input to be creative.
If it's just software, you could always cheat; Apple II emulators exist - you could have exactly that, if you want. (Granted, with worse boot time and hardware integration)
An Apple II emulator is an interesting approach. Would something like LinApple [1] work or are there other options out there that could work better?
Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?
#23iPads have a lot of good stuff, I think. I've 2x 7 year old girls, which have iPads. Generally they're limited to 1h/day, but screentime is off for:
- Codea - https://codea.io - it took a while, but eventually they found out that there's a few sample games, so they thought they'd found a loophole to "no more screentime for games". Then it took a bit longer until they realized they can tweak the source code. "Look at this, no gravity" or "Look at my high score!" (after tweaking the scores to increase in increments of 1000 instead of 1), or "Look, I changed the text messages" etc.
- Swift Playgrounds - they're not super fascinated with this, but I see them occasionally open it and noodle around.
- Procreate - they have an Apple Pencil, and any YouTube video about using Procreate is exempt from Screentime limits. This has led to a lot of amazing digital illustrations.
- Pages - just this simple built-in app is already pretty fun if kids are bored, and something is exempt from screentime. Last weekend one of them asked to go to Starbucks, because she's "writing a novel". She wrote a short story over ~5 pages, and was super proud of it.
- YouTube - in general, this is my least favorite app of theirs, and I try to police this the most. But any requests for videos where you learn things are exempt from screentime limits (case by case). E.g. Lego builds, origami, drawing instructions, "how to make slime at home" videos, etc.
This is a great question, and I'm eager to see what other creativity-fostering approaches are there. But to sum up my approach - limit screentime for mindless games, and let boredom take care of the rest.
Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?
#24From other replies on here, it seems that you are more interested in the Software side than the hardware. Scratch was the gateway drug for my kids. It immediately let them create games they could share with friends, it immediately let them grab other resources and tweak and change those for their own game.
I also kept them on linux (ubuntu) machines until they started high School - the reasons for this were 2-fold:
1) let them get comfortable with other OS's - they saw windows machines at school and ipads, this showed them that they were all 'just computers' and feel comfortable jumping between os's
2) security - oh man if you could see the amount of dodgy looking .exe and .bat files that are in the download folders.
My kids have now moved on to Godot and pygame, but an old laptop with Scratch was the key.
Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?
#25I think the problem here is that the world has moved on a lot since some of us kids were amazed at what we could make machines like an AppleII do with basic (and assembler and peek and poke). I remember being amazingly proud of myself for getting an ascii version of Space Invaders working. I could, as a 10 or 12 year old, make something for myself that kinda looked like and was way more fun (for me) to play that _lit…
> Don't get your hopes up _too_ high about your kids being the maybe 1% of people who choose to program for fun.
Programming is mostly plumbing anyway, so if your kid chooses differently, that's very ok.
Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?
#26Recommend you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 400: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400-unit/ These are about USD100 a pop and need a HDMI screen and you're all set. And then configure it to run a Basic or Python REPL on boot, to give that 1970s home PC feel.
I get this same sense. I really want to need an RPi 400 out of nostalgia. My original machine was an Atari 400. It's not much to justify, but I can't think of what I'd actually do with it, other than put it on a shelf like a hipster. I think the closest recreated retro-experience is the Commander X16[0]. The thing I like about it is that it specifically isn't a modern computer. Everything is simple right in the hardw…
At this point I think it is questionable whether the X16 will ever come out. There have been a lot of technical and supply issues, a lot of scope creep and drama in the community and there seems to have been no real significant progress updates in a long time.
An alternative that is finished and can be pre-ordered today is the MEGA65:
I don't necessarily think a kid would be interested in a glorified recreation of the Commodore 65, but it's roughly equivalent to the X16 in a lot of ways. Just thought I'd mention it.
Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?
#27Multiple things are making things seem this way, one is that the income model has significantly changed, from "we make good software, people pay us for it" to.. whatever sentence sums up the current state of exploitation.
Another reason are the proverbial rose-colored glasses.
Yet another reason is just curation and sampling issues, since we now have a whole category of shovelware and shovelware-hybrids, the chance you'll actually stumble upon the really good stuff, is just way lower..
Are we ready to pay for curation yet?
Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?
#28I built a small raspberry pi zero "laptop"[1] with 4" screen and usb battery that does not have X and inits directly into openvt that starts vim (takes like 2 seconds to boot) and it has python and you can directly write pixels into /dev/fb0, there are also console games that are quite fun.
The best part was "no distraction environment" no internet, no messages, nothing, you have to be bored a bit to get creative.
Though my daughter doesnt use it much (she did in the beginning), it is super hard to compete with modern entertainment which is so reachable and so instant. All kids get what they want immediately after they want it. I want a football, order online, it arrives same day. I want to watch this movie, they start watching.
I am trying to create some time per day, in a safe space where she can be creative and bored.
[1]: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...
Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?
#29Just get an old computer. Old computers don't die - their users do.
You can get a nicely specc'ed ZX Next (https://www.specnext.com/) or Amstrad CPC6128 for the budget, or find an old C64 and deck it out with some solid-state storage (actually do this for all the machines, they all have it now).
My kids learned hacking on an Oric Atmos with a Cumulus drive (SD-card storage), which was just mind-blowing to see and also very, very inspiring for me personally, as a 40-year veteran of the art of programming.
These systems are still out there, and still work. AND, they are amazing - just look at the beauty of the 10liner Basic competition, which this year was won by an Oric Atmos program that implemented a fully working Lunar Lander game in 10 lines of Basic, custom graphics, sound and all!
https://gkanold.wixsite.com/homeputerium/games-list-2022
(Winning entry here: https://bunsen.itch.io/moon-landing-by-rax)
Failing that, check out the Clockwork Pi options: https://www.clockworkpi.com/
Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?
#30I think the problem here is that the world has moved on a lot since some of us kids were amazed at what we could make machines like an AppleII do with basic (and assembler and peek and poke). I remember being amazingly proud of myself for getting an ascii version of Space Invaders working. I could, as a 10 or 12 year old, make something for myself that kinda looked like and was way more fun (for me) to play that _lit…
> And, to be fair, _most_ of the kids when I was in school just wanted to play Space Invader clones and not write Basic programs.
Exactly. When I was a teenager in the 80's the kids in school came in three classes: the majority who did not know what computers were or thought they were lame, a minority who dabbled in the nascent gaming scene and an even smaller minority (of maybe 5 people in a school of 1500) that was interested in programming a computer. I happened to be part of the latter minority.
The gamers were all about getting the newest (cracked) games as quickly as possible. Meanwhile we were cutting our teeth on the internals of the c64. While we were lousy gamers with zero connections, we had a certain amount of respect in the gamer community because we were actually capable of programming the intro's to their cracked games. In return we got to feed on their scraps, so there was a living in that. :-)