Steve Wozniak Was My Computer Teacher in 1995
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
8 weeks ago, I returned to the Silicon Valley for a job, and I bought a house in the hills of Los Gatos. After being here for a week, I was told that Woz lives up the hill a few house from mine.
I wake up every morning hoping to see him riding his Segway down the street, but I have yet to spot him.
Everbody wishes they could hang out with the Woz, and even though I'm 54 years old, I still have my heroes in the industry.
Woz is one of them.
Probably because he lives in Tasmania, Australia now.
https://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-Bagnall/...
It's not critical of Woz but it does re-seat him as a peripheral figure. I was surprised given the other things I've read. I'm not asserting it as the "truth" but it was a different take.
If you want to be a fragile zealot, afraid of alternative sources which I asked if you had read, go ahead.
In fact at the cost of worshiping one person as "the creator/first" of something we have the loss to history of the role the engineers at Commodore played. That's why it's important to question this stuff.
A not so nice question was asked about Woz. He responded.
http://ask.metafilter.com/47835/Woz-More-like-Was-am-I-rite#...
And now I like the guy.
Alas, these tenets of New Zealand's public education system are being systemically demolished.
Read e.g. this book if you’re curious https://amzn.com/0345806352/
We compared notes on the Sony DSC-T7 and I gawked at his Nixie tube watch.
Good times.
Logo. He should have taught them Logo.
I guess tho the main problem was that few primary school teachers in the early 90s actually had even basic programming competency. The only ones I knew who could do any programming beside the trivial textbook examples were other pupils.
But then, perhaps introverted nerds who loved play-doh over LEGOs are not the best sample set to extrapolate from.
It's not immediately obvious, but Scratch is very very good at some important things for education. Loading, saving, and starting the editor are fast even on slow machines. When things go wrong, they don't stop the rest of the program. And concurrent programs are easy to write in a wide range of styles because multi-frame loops run at exactly the same speed for all scripts.
There are a lot of imitators that improve on Scratch's weaknesses by adding first-class references to lists, sprites, and functions. Or integrating a physics engine. Or binding directly to Minecraft or Sphero. But if they are slow to load or execute, you can't iterate as many times in an hour of class. If errors demand time to troubleshoot, that attention comes out of the rest of the class's instructor time. If you are limited to only one way of writing concurrent processes, it might not be a style that fits well with a particular lesson.
I hope that the ongoing HTML5 port of Scratch gets the same things right.
Am I alone in this feeling?
Zuck had a world class programmer teaching giving him coding lessons when he was young.
I haven't found that for any lab science or engineering for that matter. I wonder why...
Based on what he does, though? If there was somehow a person who's involved in all the different stuff he is but somehow without getting major recognition or money for him (and that was not in and of itself a notable trait)? Yeah, I get the feeling he'd probably still be interesting.
"I remember feeling like I had the keys to some magical kingdom."