'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."'"

Comments

Re:Knowability

[Dunbal]

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

      Fortunately we've moved on from the days when a coder had to know the IRQs, DMA channels and interrupts and had to waste time playing around with peeks and pokes (especially when some of them required you to insert (random number of) NOP's in between because the hardware wasn't fast enough). Now we have these things called drivers and libraries that do all the basic work for us, and we can just program the high level stuff. How cool is it that I can write a multi-threaded graphical program in about 10 minutes? Try doing that in Turbo Pascal 2.0.

      Yeah it means I've had to adapt and learn new languages, new APIs and different ways of doing things. Instead of learning about ports I learn about object interfaces and methods. But you just have to keep up, like any other field. Certainly in my other hobby - medicine, if you snooze you lose.