Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Commodore 64 turns 30: What do today's kids make of it?

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19055707

Sadly, I don't think "kids today" (get off my lawn) are as interested in programming as my generation was. My first computer was a Tomy Tutor, and the first thing I did with it was learn BASIC. My second computer was a C64, and the first thing I did with it was learn BASIC. I then went on to learn assembly language, crack software (um, for archival purposes), write my own games, ...

I still have a C128DCR on my desk, next to my Power Mac G5. Works great, schleps floppy images to and from the Mac with a ZoomFloppy USB-IEC board.

Nowadays computers are engineered for consumption and people are content to think of them as black boxes, and the industry encourages it, and that's sad.

There are a lot more kids today that are into computer programming then there were back in the stone ages (continues to dance on your lawn). There's just... peculiarly enough... people who use computers today without being into programming, which tends to muddy up the waters a bit. Going from 99% of computer users being able to code programs, to maybe 5% or so... but the number of programmers is much bigger.

Sad truth is, that modern computers are just too damn complicated and the step needed to get people into programming has been raised too high. You almost need a ladder or lift to get there.

In good old times every computer came with some sort of BASIC to get people started at programming. Computers were simpler, so functionality was not hidden behind unnecessary layers and it was much easier to get some understanding how things worked.

I never had Commodore 64 myself, but many of my friends had and spent lots of time playing games with the machine.

My elementary school had Apple ][-series boxes, and programming was a part of the computer curriculum, starting at least in 4th grade. Nothing special - we used LOGO, then BASIC - but a lot more in-depth than what they're doing even at the Jr. High level in the school district where I work.

There are implementations of these simple languages still around, but programming is not considered educationally important enough to devote the resources to. The high schools offer Java as an elective, but that's about it (they've still got a decent electronics program at at least one of them).

I never had the commodore 64, but I had the commodore VIC 20. My cousins had the 64. One neighbor had a C64 with what seem like every paraphernalia hook up to it. I think he ran that thing for years.

I didn't do much programming on it, but I play Atomic Rat Race to death. My mother was a programmer for Bell Labs starting around 1981 so for some reason computers didn't seem all that magical to me being I was surrounded by it, the stuff was all over my house. I was at my parents house this past Christmas and she had one of her punch cards on the book shelf, I took a photo of it. she tried hard to get me into programming, reason for the VIC 20 and the 286. I actually refuse to learn the stuff. So in a way I was like the young ones today.

Now I'm trying to get my son (14 yrs) to learn Quartz Composer with me, he wants do computer animation, but the kid don't want to go through the challenging stuff. Quartz Composer isn't that hard, its node based.

I think the inclusion of BASIC in consumer-focused computers had as much to do with what was available in the '77-'82 timeframe, and the fact that they were creating a new market segment from scratch. You had to include BASIC or something similar because a lot of people expected that $1,200-$600-$300 box to be able to do something when you unpacked it. And looking at buying software, you had to have something useful/interesting available , then not mind paying another $20-100 per title after buying the machine, peripherals, power strip, etc.

I just mean to point out that there were several factors involved in the decision to include a programming language in that era, many of them altruistic and education-oriented I grant you, but it wasn't an intrinsic quality of computers. Non-consumer vendors (DEC, IBM, etc) had very different goals for very different markets and would happily charge you hundreds or thousands for an interpreter, sometimes even when building a machine that others would view as very well suited for the consumer space.

As to unnecessary layers, I'd say that was just the limit of what was possible and a hell-for-leather rush to market. You could certainly look at dBASE or UCSD Pascal and see that if you had the resources, you could still be insulated from the machine.

C64s are mainly regarded as a retro console AFAIK.

I agree with Guardian, by the way.

I've been doing a few days worth of work at a local university...


Doing anything with your parents as a teenager is pretty un cool teenagers want their space.

@Guardian.. More programmers today you say... more poser, want-to-be, tech heads who act like they know everything but actually know absolutely nothing and have no skills in anything behind them...I am shocked by kids today, I've been practically worshipped for doing little to nothing on a cake-walk project which is "far too difficult" for the current crop of grads... who say "rah-rah, yay-yay, I'm awesome"... first slight hurdle or the rubber hits the road and rah-rah I'm awesome becomes "way-wah everything sucks". They expect to press a single button and the code just rolls out magically all around them.
Lots and lots more "programmers" ... so few people actually able to write code.

Back in the day, I knew very little but probably enough to keep my mouth shut except to ask stuff like... "You mean you wrote your entire O/S from scratch and burnt it in an eeprom"..? and ... "what do you meant you'll just just code it in your head in hex and dump it straight to disk and attempt to boot it"... People who coded in binary or hex... did maths in different bases.. programmed mostly in solder... those guys were legends and very made little noise about stuff. People who thought my C= 64 was cute and much simpler than designing their machines from scratch just to track satellites or intercept HF radio fax...for fun..

@SAQ teaching Java to kids should be considered child abuse.
[/rant]


R

Yeah, I knew this one guy that made me lean towards things this, and I really should have mentioned this earlier. (I actually love this topic.)

He said that object-orientation is tough to apply to code.

Later, I met another guy that told me that he's a "master" programmer; he has job offers at such big names as Google.

He SOLIDIFIED this notion!

He told me that I'm a moron for choosing scalability over ease of development.

He also complains all day about how people make it too hard to program.

Apparently, if you use programming languages like C and C++ that are more difficult, then you're an idiot for not choosing the easy route.

"if you use c++, you might as well reinvent the wheel but in assembly. you should program everything, operating system and up, and then make your website on that."

He told me that a video game that I'm still programming is stupid because it runs on platforms other than OSX and iOS. When I told him that my audience uses Windows primarily and not OSX, he said:

"you base your audience on your moron friends."

He couldn't get it nailed into his head if a customer hit his head with a brick that he is not as valuable as the customer.

He also loves breaking backwards compatibility.

So, that's a good story for you guys.

Note that I'm not saying that I'm a great programmer. I'm just saying that most new programmers shouldn't have made it through college, and if they're still in high school or college, they shouldn't be calling themselves programmers unless they've made something serious.

Hell, one couldn't even do basic percentages...and yet he has an MD in CS.

(Shall I forward this by saying I finished my BSEET earlier this year?)

I went to a school were we had to solder together our own boards before we could program our 8051 MCUs in assembler and then interface said 8051s in assembler to all sorts of random hardware: displays, ps/2 keyboards, etc... We learned about vacuum tubes, tesla coils, jacobs ladders, radio transmissions... analog semiconductors... power distribution, computer programming, telecom (old-fashioned, we had a class 5 pstn switch to play with), a bit of welding.. My senior project involved AVRs on one end (two, one for each foot), and iphone objective-C on the other end. And a proprietary wireless protocol in the middle. And hundreds of miles of running.

I thought I would focus on the feet and the shoes. A fair bit of the work went into the sensors and whittling chunks of foam around them, and I enjoyed that because it was an excuse to run to test changes. I've learned it's better to focus on running and coaching others; nobody needs to know I was a computer nerd back in the day unless they see the onyx coffee table in the living room.

I would not know what java looked like if you hit me over the head with it. I can do asm for a couple different chips, C, objective-C, mathematica, a bit of python. Not saying I couldn't, just have never seen it.

Nowadays I have two hats: industrial automation, and movie-making. While I don't have a C64 I do have an Apple IIe to futz with and be taught the way things used to be.

Compared to universities here, I am impressed, I've had a MSc grad tell me he'd never been lower level than the JVM and grads who can't write 5 lines of perl..
... and these are the kids that are not out-sourcing their homework...

R.

I don't do that stuff in the first place...hah.

Although my school won't let me take any tech until AP Computer Science (Java) in Senior year...

I think that is a bit absurd.

Microcomputer is proper term as you could do lot more than only play games.

True most people only played games, but there was also lots of other kind of software available and foundations of modern computers and software were laid with systems like that.

When the word "micro" disappeared and everything became simply computers, we also lost variety and big part of fun in computing.

Yeah, I know....but a lot of people think that they were consoles.

Also, have you guys seen the new ones? Lol

Since I'm in the "current generation" of newer programmers, I figured I'd reply.

At 10 years old I got into programming from a May/June/July (I can't recall exactly) 1995 issue of Boys Life , there an article about programming, specifically QBasic. I started plugging away at it on my 486 DX2-66mhz PC. From then on I scoured through all of my dad's Visual Basic, C and Perl books in the pre-unlimited internet days (128k T-Online ISDN was very expensive in Germany back in 97-2000, maybe still is?). Once I had unlimited ASDL (and later cable) in 2000, the scouring continued into C++, OpenGL, SDL, PHP, C# etc.

I can only imagine if I had the resources kids have today back when I first started diving in how much farther along I would be. The one negative that I see with kids today though is the instant gratification/laziness seems to only get worse with every year. If the kids don't pick it up instantly, they drop it and move onto something else or simply adopt the "Copy & Paste" Method, without actually knowing what they are doing. Those kids can churn out code, whether it is there own or a concatenation of theirs and MSDN, but when asked to do something outside of the Samples folder, they say it is impossible (I have had a CIO/Senior Programmer of a Vendor say as such in the last year multiple times).

Another thing I see as problematic going forward is that kids (and my generation) learn something once and never wanting to keep themselves current, which is especially bad if you're doing C# for instance, in which there are always new ways to do things coming out of Microsoft (Had a WCF Primer over Email to a Senior Architect a few weeks back, still don't think he really understands the power it has over a typical SOAP Service, but that's another story). I find myself spending almost all of my free time keeping up in C#, SQL Server, Architecture Patterns and older books based on PymbleSoftware's (thank you again) suggestions in the past. I don't know anyone else personally between the 3 vendors my employer outsources to that devote their time to it, but I don't see another way to call myself a Senior Programmer if I didn't keep myself current and accepted long ago that this came with the job.

Adrenaline isn't as new as the really bad ones that I referenced. I think that they began around the time that it became "mainstream" to "program" in easier languages like VB.NET and non-programming markup languages like HTML.

Sweet program, though EE seems not to have suffered as much decay as CS in general. I'm still pretty convinced that assembler should be taught to advanced HS/beginning college students so they have a better feel for how the computer does things. Then move on to the HLLs.

Couldn't agree more, the best CS class I ever took in college was CS238:x86 Assembly taught by the Program Manager of the NASA Environmental Monitoring Satellites. The guy was super sharp and learned so many good principles that carry with me today. All of the other courses, especially the Java based ones looking back didn't teach me anything other than how to solve some un-real world problem (god help current gen students who don't learn outside of class surviving as a Junior Programmer). Granted I did college kind of backwards, about 6 months after that assembly class I got a PHP/Oracle Full Time job so I put school on the back burner for a year and then did 1 or 2 classes a semester online at UMD to finish up.

So, Adrenaline ... since you've outed yourself, let me ask a question or two :

Why are "developers" incompetent nitwits ? Go look at half the websites on the Internet. Put simply, they are nonfunctional shit. To extend that thought, much of what I have to deal with that's computerized is also semi-functional shit. Maybe that's strictly in userland but from what I've seen of humanity, it's unlikely that everything in userland is crap while everything in professional-land is wonderful.

If you'd like to know, I can tell you why many manufactured goods nowadays stink ....