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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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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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