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Awesome post! Looking forward to teaching my daughter and (later) son programming too -- though it's going to have to be Pascal, which is what my dad initiated me with :)

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If you want to go old school and use Turbo Pascal, TP 5 is free to use. Otherwise look into FreePascal

What I really loved is that how easy it was to write directly to the video buffer (320x200 256), it was ultra fast and I could even make simple games and shiny stuff :) Not sure if it's possible to do that outside dosbox anymore.

It was really easy!

I made a resistor ladder DA convertor, and then wrote data to the parallel port with a few simple BASIC "OUT" instructions.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.electronics.basi...

https://hackaday.com/2014/09/29/the-lpt-dac/

Some GB emulators (NO$ at least) used this for sound, and it was quite good.

I think you should also consider letting them use the more modern learning environments for kids, too. It's hard to do fun things in Turbo Pascal, but it's easy to do fun things in languages like Scratch ([Jr]), Racket, and Python.

I say this with a tremendous love of Turbo Pascal - it was my first real programming environment as a kid. But I also had a great time with environments like Klik-n-Play and GameMaker.

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