71–80 of 133 posts
I don’t want him to use tik tok or facebook but maybe I will buy an apple 2 or setup a rpi emulator and play little old school games that weren’t available online.
I'm old enough and lucky enough to have had my first computing experiences (1978-80) be on a teletype in our elementary school which was connected to a minicomputer that the town owned. The connection was an acoustically coupled modem/analog phone line that ran at 300 baud. The exciting thing was to write very basic BASIC programs and see results on the printout. There was no CRT, everything was via the literal telet…
You could use this audio at 300 baud by recording it on a standard audio cassette. Then play the audio back as input to the modem to retrieve the data
I got my C64 in 1985. Obviously, I can revisit the graphics and sounds of that machine online now, via emulators and youtube videos. But one thing I always remember is the smell of warming circuit boards that oozed from the casing soon after you turned on the computer. Anecdotally, the cassette player that came with the machine had a misconfigured tape head. Because there was no internet nobody knew why it didn't loa…
At school we had a bunch of older machines with windows 3.1, which had some touch typing program installed - it was the only thing we were allowed to use Our first family computer was bought back in 1995. IIRC it was a 166 MHz Pentium / 16 MB ram machine with Windows 95. It cost around $3500-4000 back then, and that's not adjusted for inflation. EDIT: As a side note, 3 years later I managed to get my hands on a copy…
I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck. The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a lot of free time could mess around with. The second was attending a high school with a reaso…
I've heard this story several times before and I, myself, had an unusually open minded computer teacher as a youth. I'm beginning to suspect this attribute is is not so unusual amongst computer teachers as has been assumed.
One thing that was nice about the graphics programming those days was that when you drew something on the screen, it remained there until your program erased it. This means that you could create cool looking graphics easily. For example, you can just compute the points of a circle and draw the points one by one, and in the screen it will show a full circle being drawn. "Modern" graphics libs (even SDL I think), made…
SDL is a relatively high level API and framebuffer style graphics work fine on it. I think there are some edge cases for X11 with non-compositing window manager where you will get interesting glitches if the window moves.
That smell thing is so real. I still get hit with it randomly and I'm immediately 10 years old again
Yeah that jumped out to me, when I read that line I could instantly remember the smell of my school’s computer lab, like a time warp in my brain. More than 20 years later I can picture the lab from high school perfectly, I could draw a little map right now of which computers were where.
At school we had a bunch of older machines with windows 3.1, which had some touch typing program installed - it was the only thing we were allowed to use Our first family computer was bought back in 1995. IIRC it was a 166 MHz Pentium / 16 MB ram machine with Windows 95. It cost around $3500-4000 back then, and that's not adjusted for inflation. EDIT: As a side note, 3 years later I managed to get my hands on a copy…
I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck. The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a lot of free time could mess around with. The second was attending a high school with a reaso…
Raspberry Pi is a nice exception. I know there are other good examples, but it was the first thing I thought of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck. The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a lot of free time could mess around with. The second was attending a high school with a reaso…
>I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck. >The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s >The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab So, you essentially own your career to your parents being well-off and tech inclined . It's not like you ended up in that high school by accident . Sure, being born in such a family is a stroke of luck that many pe…
I too started using computers at a young age and loved them and even got my own Nintendo when I was young. I feel very conflicted about the current anti screen fad. My son is very young and my wife doesn’t want him to use screens at all. I don’t want him to use tik tok or facebook but maybe I will buy an apple 2 or setup a rpi emulator and play little old school games that weren’t available online.
I think the staunch "no screen" mentality is a broad-stroke lever that non-technical thought leaders in the child wellness space have stuck to, and I understand where they come from.
Though, as someone who owes his livelihood to being able to tinker and experiment with technology as a child, I'm looking toward a more measured approach. I may very well set up an airgapped Linux box (Windows has come a long way since the XP days, and gone entirely the wrong way) and let my kids proverbially "have at it" - this way, they can't get stuck in big tech's psycho-loops or sucked into YouTube's colourful dopamine machine - which I think, is the entire drive behind "no screens".
I think well-measured exposure is imperative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck. The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a lot of free time could mess around with. The second was attending a high school with a reaso…
>I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck. >The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s >The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab So, you essentially own your career to your parents being well-off and tech inclined . It's not like you ended up in that high school by accident . Sure, being born in such a family is a stroke of luck that many pe…