Comment by scarygliders | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarygliders | Hacker News Reader

There is something about 1980's-era computers which make them so much more accessable to kids than today's systems.

It's probably to do with how much simpler they are - if I can put my finger on it, I'd say it's because they don't have lots of Things which can tempt you to distraction; for example - if they had a web browser of some kind back then, you'd be tempted away from learning to program in BASIC, or learning how to load that simple-but-fun game.

They generally were single task machines that allowed you to focus on one Thing.

I'm looking at my Linux desktop right now on this machine. I have a web browser I'm using to type this reply. It also has 8 other tabs open - more tabs will be added later as I continue on my search for knowledge. I have a Konsole terminal open with IRC sessions to multiple servers and channels open. I have PyCharm loaded. I have a VM running, and more to run later. All vying for my time and energy. A child using this machine would be overwhelmed.

Even a Raspberry Pi can distract the user of it in the same manner as my desktop.

Perhaps it's time to reintroduce kids today to the CoCo2's, the VIC-20's, the C64's, the Spectrums, the ZX81's and so on. Perhaps getting kids to use single-task-at-a-time systems to learn instead of the distraction-inducing tech. of today, would be a very good idea.

When my son was 2.5 years old, I put in front of him an ancient old Compaq laptop running Debian. It had Tuxpaint running on it, and I just put it in front of him and let him go on it. Within a short space of time he was using Tuxpaint like a "pro", and then he learned how to power the machine up, and type in his login name and password. Sure, you can do this with today's systems, but they do make it so easy to provide tons of distractions.

Its the enormity of the abstractions that have to be embraced, in my opinion, which lead to distraction. There is much between a file and its handle.

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.

I'm not so sure lack of distractions makes that much difference. I think on my C64 it was frequently the case that we'd switch games every few minutes. We were easily distracted with or without something specific to trigger it.

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.

That hard drive probably had "sticktion", where the read/write head sticks to the platter surface, preventing the motor from spinning the drive up. It can happen if you leave a hard drive running for a while and then shut it down without allowing it to park its head.

Modern hard drives are clever enough to park the head when they detect the power supply turning off, so it hasn't been such a problem recently.

The recommended solution for sticktion is to lift the comptuter (or hard drive, if it is separate) about an inch off the desk, and let go.

When I was a Customer Support Engineer for SGI way back, I had to swap out a load of IBM drives on lots of SGI kit at various customer locations due to this, which was dubbed "The IBM Stiction Problem".

Power off --> remove drive --> Sharply tap the drive on desk --> replace drive + add new drive --> clone

The look on customer faces at the "Sharply tap the drive on desk" stage was as priceless as the data on the hard drive B)

A while back, my workplace had a medium-sized disc array. That is, something like a hundred UW-SCSI 72GB drives, arranged into about twelve different RAID-5 sets. When we had to power it down because of scheduled electrical work in the building, about eight of the drives failed to come up again. It's a miracle none of the RAID-5 sets were broken. Hard drives don't like being switched off if they have been going for a couple of years.

And that is why RAID is no substitute for backups, people. A reasonable proportion of events that will take out a hard drive will take out more than one.

Maybe. What I maybe didn't make clear, though, was that this wasn't a one off thing: I had to manually spin it up every time I turned it on. After the first couple of times I didn't bother screwing the cover back on, and occasionally I'd leave it off to show friends...

I know someone who got his drive working again after the drive heads had fused to the plate by slowly heating the drive in an oven while it was connected. They then proceeded to copy data off as quickly as possible. Poor mans version of what some recovery services does if the above advice of dropping/tapping on it doesn't work...

I fried my first C64 pulling out dual-inline package chips while the power was on.

>I think on my C64 it was frequently the case that we'd switch games every few minutes.

Except when it took like 20 minutes to load a game from cassette.

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