My boys love 1986 computing

Then, most important of all: don't leave them alone with it. Stay there and play with them. Maybe you'll enjoy a return to the 8-bit software development days too, just for the heck of it. Disclaimer: this worked for my two boys.

One of the things that I think may be going on here is that exploration now feels daunting. It's hard to get excited about getting things to print "hello world" when in another windows are bright colored animated characters engaging in absurd hijinks. However, being able to create one's own absurd hijinks may just help rekindle that spark.

For us that have already been spoiled by modern computing, we need to be shown what useful stuff that we can do by learning about computers (obviously we would need to be on a relatively open modern computer). If most people are satisfied with whatever gets them through the more-or-less intuitive GUIs that lets them watch some videos, do they really need to know more? Well yes, when their computer eventually starts behaving strangely and simply restarting it doesn't help... but that kind of frustrating troubleshooting doesn't leave a good taste in many people's mouth when it comes to having to deal with computers.

If they are already used to modern, powerful computing, chances are that they won't be impressed by the usual computer wizardry that programmers are impressed by. Simply because they don't need, or don't see the utility in, shuffling a bunch of text around efficiently. Instead of becoming a wiz at retro computing - which might be in part because you need to be a wiz, simply because it is more primitive - what can we impress people with on modern computers that they can't do themselves easily (and would like to do)? They've already been spoiled by modern computing - for many, there is no turning back.

If the only real allure of being a computer whiz - to most people, anyway - is to be able to operate arcane technology, then the value proposition simply isn't there for people that do not appreciate computing in itself (and even that might be an acquired taste, so sort of a catch 22). It's like a classical guitar virtuoso who can be motivated to learn songs and pieces solely for the technical challenge they pose, while his students just want to gain the skills necessary to learn their favourite band's songs, or the songs that they've written themselves.

I set them up with a really old, crappy PC running Linux. Taught them how to tinker around on the CLI and run Zork in an emulator. They had many hours of fun.

Then set them up on the Alice programming environment on the communal/family PC (running XP), and they had fun with that for a long while, too.

Once they had free internet access, my daughter discovered Hanna Montana videos on YouTube, and the self-learning pretty much ended. Ditto w/ my son and watching video game playthroughs, though he got a little more incidental learning about computers trying to tweak whatever rig he had access in order make games perform better.

However, the internet has really empowered my kids to learn all kinds of stuff. From my son setting up Minecraft servers and fighting with port forwarding on the home router, to my daughter learning sewing techniques and guitar chords online.

Today's PC environment has come a long way from my days of exploring arcane PEEK and POKE commands from the back of a magazine on my TI-99/4A (in between rounds of Munch Man, of course). There is so much more info accessible now (both utilitarian and trivial), that I just can't grouse about where most kids run with that info. In the end, I think my kids are way better off now than I was back then, even though they're not nearly as inclined to tinker under the hood as I was.

I'm beginning to see a solution in a separate computer just for Internet access, as PG suggested several years ago. The one for work should just redirect everything to localhost or not have network access at all.

My worry, though, is that I'd be unplugging the modem from the timer and hooking it directly into the wall whenever I work from home, and that'd be a slippery slope to just having it hooked up all the time again.

We started 3 years ago[2] and never stopped!

(We have one recurring challenge: find good tools and (French) documentation to help kids that excel at Scratch or other 'kids languages' make the jump to Python or javascript. CodeCombat is not up to it, for example. That's why I personally started a generative art workshop for young kids based on Processing Python Mode, not Scratch.)

[1] http://codinggouter.org [2] http://ils.sont.la/post/kids-code-and-cakes-coding-gouter-pa...

In the mid-90s, we picked up an used Mac Plus for our 5-year-old. He loved it, had no problem playing the heck out of the games, negotiating menus, etc. (Although I did get irrationally mad when, as he was playing Spit on Saddam -- a local Apple guy had written it, so I'd loaded it for kicks -- he actually spit on the screen.)

So great, maybe I can start working in some HyperCard, give him some control. No interest whatsoever. I even hacked some of his games, to show him the possibilities of coding. He was amused, but still had no interest.

He got older and got the thrill of modem WoW with friends, but he still had no interest coding -- althoug I did catch him learning the warez culture.

About this time, I became addicted to browsing the state surplus equipment lot, and found that they had, literally, a pile of computers they sold at auction for essentially the cost of hauling it all away. In each pile, there were always some Macs. So I got to know the computer scrap guys and would buy discarded Macs for $10 a pallet -- and they thought I was a sucker.

To the point, the kid loved taking computers apart -- especially after discovered a PowerMac uprgrade card in a half laptop that I'd told him to toss. Nothing like an elementary kid earning $200 on eBay to keep him interested. He also helped me refurb/clone a bunch of Macs for his brother's preschool.

Bottom line: He learned how to handle the guts of computers, and to build networks from surplus routers so all his friends could come over for game nights, etc. But he never wrote a line of code through high school, despite my best efforts.

Then he got to college, decided he wanted to do CompSci. He was way behind in coding, but -- since it was a small liberal arts school -- the department was glad to have him and was patient. Plus he had some hands-on hardware skills that few others had (because the family computers were too expensive to tinker with, or no one knew anything about the innards).

He's now a gainfully employed SysAdmin, with a wife and mortgage and personal projects on the side -- and all his old pals still get together for game nights.

Maybe I wasn't a skilled or patient instructor, or maybe kids are just going to be what they are.

And thus: Far, far more words - real, English and/or Development-oriented words, symbols - exist in all the infinite abstractions of a typical Desktop machine; whereas the 8-bit worlds' abstract taxonomy is very sparse.

There isn't really any good reason to throw away the 8-bit machines. They still work. And they still teach kids how computers work, even still today. I hope we see a return to this technology in a fashion that really compels people - young and old - to apply the ethos of those days, again. Distraction-free computing is one legacy of the earlier era.

But these computers were simple enough to "mess with" and get a mental model of the whole. By the time I was 7-8, I started "experimenting" with pulling chips out of sockets (to my parents horror) and seeing what happened if I put them in different places (...). If you even could have done that on modern machines with almost everything surface mounted, you'd fry stuff. With those old machines that was usually fairly hard. Amazingly, I never burned out any chips that way. The simplicity encouraged meddling with things in a way that is harder to see younger kids do with most modern computers:

PCs are outright dangerous to let a young child dismantle on their own - whether or not you disconnect power (I'm afraid my C64's were more than once opened up while connected..); machines like the Raspberry Pi are simple and safe enough, but there's nothing to do inside them. Likewise for tablets and smart phones: If you manage to disconnect the display without breaking anything, you're pretty much at the limits.

If you try to break into the black box as a child, you're faced with an image of something that is way beyond your comprehension.

The C64 and similar home computers, on the other hand, had clearly labelled diagrams in their manuals that even a child could understand. You'd open it up, and you'd see what the different things were, and you could tinker (at least if you didn't tell your parents) and see the effects.

It seems like it is harder to become "independent": Children learn a few "magic incantations" to get to the familiar things, and the knowledge required to bridge the gaps where exploration yields results that encourage further exploration seems higher. Or maybe that's what it looked like to our parents too.

A few years older, I soldered wires straight onto the pins of the CPU of my Amiga. You could make a "pause" switch and reset button easily that way - you could solder it onto the bus exposed on the left hand side of the A500's too, but I had a hard drive attached there.

Speaking of hard drives, considering the article mentions demonstrating floppy drives with the cover off, of course I did that with my 1541 drive for the C64 (and test what happened when moving the IO chips between the 1541 and the C64 - they're "almost" the same model; enough so that the C64 at least will run; same for the one from the Amiga - their differences are small enough to be inconsequential for most programs), but also with my first (20MB) hard drive out of necessity: I bought it used, and within 6 months it started having problems starting up. The solution? Open it up, and give the motor a helping hand spinning up the platter - after that it worked fine. The drive survived another two years I think after that.

The same could be said about Internet, people say "there was no Internet distractions" when you could disconnect the network in any computer with a 3 seconds click.

In fact what threads do is make your life easier. I did program a multimedia program in DOS using INTs and it was the definition of hell.

Now you could make a simple audio thread, another simple picture animation thread and the more complicated thing you deal with is managing mutexes, that is super easy if you understand them.

It has been with me to Japan for 6 years. I forgot to reset the voltage from 110v to the UK's 240v and the magic white smoke from the capacitors escaped the PSU.

But the Amiga itself survived to tell the tale and is working happily with the new PSU ;)

But with the CD route, I trust them with something that cost a few cents, and with an interface they already know (play, stop, and next track buttons). Way easier for them and far fewer consequences for trips or spilled water!