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'Retro Programming' Teaches Using 1980s Machines
Death Metal Maniac writes "A few lucky British students are taking a computing class at the National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park using 30-year-old or older machines. From the article: '"The computing A-level is about how computers work and if you ask anyone how it works they will not be able to tell you," said Doug Abrams, an ICT teacher from Ousedale School in Newport Pagnell, who was one of the first to use the machines in lessons. For Mr Abrams the old machines have two cardinal virtues; their sluggishness and the direct connection they have with the user. "Modern computers go too fast," said Mr Abrams. "You can see the instructions happening for real with these machines. They need to have that understanding for the A-level."'"
Makes a lot more sense than starting them off in some poo like Java where they never need to know about the real hardware.
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I feel us programmers have gotten too far away from the lower level aspects of the craft and are now too higher level focused. While, this isn't a bad thing (why should you rewrite a framework everytime you start a new application) - it really perverts ones respects for how things work and efficency.
I am getting back into assembly programming after 8 years of C# and it is a bit of a shift in thought. My college switched from C/C++ to Java my senior year for incoming freshman - a real shame. Programming is totally different when you have no respect of memory management.
Yes, it makes sense. The students get an intimate feel for writing programs without being able to waste resources ramapantly.
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One of the great things about the early micros (and probably the even-earlier minis) is that they were Knowable. With a little time, an intelligent person could become familiar with the workings of the entire architecture. I used to have a map of every memory location in the 64KB of ye olde C64 (most of it was user RAM of course) explaining what each byte was for. POKE a different value to a certain address, and the background color changes. PEEK at a certain address and it tells you the current hour. You could learn this... all of it. Obviously that's just not possible with modern computers (probably not even modern phones); no one person can grok the whole system.
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Yes, it makes perfect sense for two reasons.
A) It teaches people how to use unfamiliar hardware/software. Chances are the thing you are going to be running at your job is not going to be the thing you studied in university for.
B) It teaches kids how to not make mistakes in coding. Make a big enough mistake and the entire system goes down. Compilers are also a lot less fault tolerant.
C) It teaches kids how computers actually work by pealing back layers of abstraction. Think about it, has the average person under 20 ever used a CLI? For anything? I think the closest people come these days to actually using a CLI is typing in something on the Windows "Run" dialog.
D) It puts things in perspective. It shows how you don't need a Core i7 to play games, that a graphics card with 100 times the memory of the entire computer isn't required to make art, etc.
E) Its fun. The old computers had a lot more easter eggs built in and little tiny quirks. These days you get a Dell/HP/Gateway/Acer/Asus/etc slap Windows/Linux/OS X on it and its the same as any other Windows/Linux/OS X box, but the old computers all had little things different, some things were frustrating of course, but when you don't have to do it for any too serious of work, it can be kinda fun digging out the old Commodore 64.
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Yes, it makes great sense. WHen getting started, it really helps if you're forced to deal with the low level, and more if you can actually see the low level.
I've spent a large part of my career writing software realted to tape drives. It really helped me getting started that I could sit down in front on an old IBM 9-track reel-to-reel to test my code. Not the most useful thing for production data storage, but terrific for seeing problems with production code. Miss the end-of-tape marker? Flap-flap-flap-flap doh!
Similarly, writing and debugging production assembly code made me very comfortable with debugging and crash analysis on higher-level languages, even if I didn't quite have matching source. And that experience in turn lets me understand "what really happens" with a language like C# or Java, and for example explain to people why, for example, the .NET file rename function is no substitute for the Win32 file rename system call, despite the fact "they both just rename a file". STuff that should be obvious to even a junior programmer but, well, isn't.
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But DOS doesn't have all the neat tools.
I learned on a PDP-8; 16K of hand-strung RAM and a CPU slow enough that you could put an AM radio next to it and hear it compute.
This thing came with all sorts of neat tools, including assembler (of course) and a FORTRAN compiler.
You learned to program good, tight code and really, really thought about your data structures.
Sure, programming today is much, much easier and we can do lots more. I cringe when I look at FORTRAN IV code these days; it's painful. But it did teach me a lot.
Seriously, how is this useful in modern computing, other than as a "Back in my day..." quote?
Learning how to use older/simpler machines is an excellent way to learn about a number of fundamental concepts. Modern computing, for all its advances, still operates off the same fundamental principles as it did fifty years ago; it's simply become orders of magnitude more complex.
Now, while it's perfectly possible to learn how to do this sort of thing using emulation or specialized training software, there's real value to having an appreciation of the history of the field you're planning to enter, and working with machines that were once considered state-of-the-art is a very effective way to gain a sense of just how insanely far computing has come. Note, too, that simply because you're never going to be called upon to program a PDP-8 in real life doesn't mean that you can't learn a fair amount of generally-applicable knowledge about hardware, logic, branching, execution, input, output, and instruction sets. In fact, by pulling yourself out of a familiar environment, you're forced to pay attention to important things that you'd otherwise happily ignore--like "well, how does what is in my head actually get into a computer's inner workings?"
Finally, always remember that programming is a subset of computer science. Even if all you ever expect to do is write code, a deeper knowledge of what goes on between the compiler and the electrons is going to be quite useful--and will make you a better coder, to boot.
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New cars are wonderfully simple under the hood, once you strip away all the plastic. Ever taken apart an old carburetor before? Ever try to get it back together in working order? Give me a FI computer, airflow sensor, and fuel injector any day. Not surprisingly, cars went from a maintenance interval of 1,000 miles with a life expectancy of 50,000 miles to a maintenance interval of 10,000 miles and a life expectancy of 250,000 miles by *avoiding* complexity.