Comment by Stefan-H | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Stefan-H | Hacker News Reader

There was a sweet spot with computer technologies for some decades where hobbyists could afford to experiment and even push the envelope in the nascent field of computing - similar to genetic radiation, many niches were formed and rapidly filled. The computing biome has evolved to the point where most entities are not operating at the low-level abstractions that were once the only means of interacting with the computing environment, instead they operate now at the highest levels of abstraction we are capable, so called "natural language".

"The difficulty was the knowledge. You came to know that machine the way you come to know anything that pushes back. The resistance was the whole medium. You only ever know the things that you can lose to."

We who grew up in this era formed a hands-on engineer's knowledge of these systems, built from experience and practice, learning these layers of abstraction as the bleeding edge developed. Many these days have entered into a world where there are easy answers abound, they just might not be right, and one has to gauge how much they care about correctness.

This is definitely true, and we definitely need something similar again. I've been using a game ("The Farmer Was Replaced") as a jumping-off point for teaching the kids Python, but the more I think about it, the more I think that they need some sort of hardware package similar to an old Apple //e that gives them just enough rope to hang themselves. It was easy, back in the day, to learn a ton (even assembler) on a system like that, and I feel like there's some value in rewinding the clock back to that point, forking the experience from there, and seeing what a new generation of kids will cook up.

Zach Barth and his former studio Zachtronics released several entertaining puzzle games based on idealized fake assembly languages. These are a lot of fun and useful for introducing registers and multiprocessing.

I keep coming back to the idea of taking that concept and just running with it, IE building up a toolchain alongside some concrete tasks to solve with it and just adding more detail until we reach a reasonably sophisticated level

I've been staring at 0x10c, carwars and battletech and there's a sense that I could build a sort of programming / engineering Zach like

If you want to go the old computer route, find an old vic-20. It has the best manual for any computer ever made imo

> ... I think they need some sort of hardware package similar to an old Apple //e that gives them just enough rope to hang themselves.

Something like https://miniscript.org/MiniMicro/ perhaps? It's a virtual machine rather than real hardware, but apart from using disk image files instead of real floppy drives, the experience should be rather similar to what we* grew up on.

* Mine was a KayPro II running CP/M rather than an Apple //e, but you get the idea.

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