Processors Under Pillows
mr-x.medium.com
mr-x.medium.com
The computers we got were always expensive though, I don't know what our 386 cost, but our pentium mmx 150 MHz was the equivalent of 1500 euro's. I wasn't allowed to open it.
Imagine how thrilled I am with current day Raspberry Pi's! I tell my kids they can do whatever they want with them! I got a second hand pretty good HP business model laptop, put Ubuntu on it, made accounts for the kids. I tell them they have to figure stuff out themselves. The thing can do so much! But it just isn't the same to them it seems.
Maybe the magic, the newness, the expensiveness was part of the appeal for me, maybe the kids are just swamped in compute power and touchscreens from birth, it's too normal. Maybe my kids just aren't nerds like me. I don't know. I gave up the pushing, instead I focus on them getting things done and working themselves. They have the time to figure stuff out, even if they are almost dying to see the next (animated) episode of Lassie on Netflix (what a dog, animated or not)...
I remember a blog being posted here on HN where a fellow hacker did all of the tech for his family (a natural instinct), and he created a bunch of digital illiterates as a results. I'm trying to not fall for that trap at the very least.
I think so too. In my case, it was all new stuff and everybody was trying to figure it out, myself included. Technology is way more common now than it was then!
> I remember a blog being posted here on HN where a fellow hacker did all of the tech for his family, and he created a bunch of digital illiterates as a results. I'm trying to not fall for that trap at the very least.
About 12 years too late on that one for me!
They are curious, and they do tinker with stuff when I'm there, but about 10 minutes after I leave the room they'll find a way to watch cartoons.
Somehow the internet has become this huge distraction and mostly just a replacement for a TV. I kinda miss what it was like in the 1990ies and early 2000s.
"Moving: There are few forces more powerful than geeks desperately trying to get internet in a new apartment."
If my parents turned off the internet, or just blocked youtube, my #1 mission would be to restore that service by whatever means possible.
Turns out, there was a line issue outside my house :P
Fun things are visual, immediate full of feedback and introspection, a sensible curve of difficulty and reward for effort
A raspberry pi doesn't spark joy, in fact most computers don't
I'm not exactly sure how we could do better but Bret Victor's talk inventing on principle and his other talks are always an inspiration
I'd love lots of custom project specific UI in my ide showing all kinds of things to help me out with my larger projects
The Python arcade package is also absolutely fun. We spent a day programming a Snake-clone, and some things like the predefined color names are just hilarious. (But I realised that building a game with a run loop is probably too hard for beginners)
My main problem is the difficulty part you mention: There's a pretty big step before you can do rewarding things like moving the player with keyboard control in a fun way.
shutdown /r /m \\IPAddress /t 0 *
Today in schools, this would sadly get you expelled for "computer network hacking".
Later we found a neat exploit / remote access kit, friend of mine could merge the backdoor onto a random .exe file (we used a desktop sheep because ha ha look at the funny sheep). We got that onto a number of school PC's and told people off for using MSN at school for example. I also used it on my parents' computer and found out how much they had on their savings account.
Silly: I had a dozen other accounts ;)
Using nlite with xp sp3 to make 256mb sd ram usable with out needing to reinstall the os every few weeks was the challenge.
Also, trying out Ubuntu through free Linux cd shipped from somewhere in the world was literally the most exciting experience of 8th grade.
In my case the magical Windows version was Windows 95 Final Beta (AKA Chicago), which I managed to get through my fathers connections. Oh boy it was exciting for a fouth-grader to install it and figure out what went wrong etc.
(Although I strongly was in the OS/2 and Mac camps at the time;-)
I also had the windows key memorized just like the author does. But it was windows 98, and I can’t recall it now. I think the last time I tried to write it out was when I was around 18, so the key lasted at least 10 years in my memory
I also don't remember this one, but I have a Soldier of Fortune CD key committed to long term memory for some inexplicable reason!
My workaround was to open up the case while he was gone, and take all the components out of it. I took the Power supply, hard drive, motherboard, and all the components except floppy drive and CDROM, since those were visually external. Basically he had an empty ATX case sitting in his room.
I packed all that hardware into my backpack, no static bags, no boxes, just that hardware flopping around in my bag... I took it went to my friends house and just would go over there and use it after school instead. When it was time to get it back, I loaded all my hardware back in, and he never found out...