One of the main problem in getting a kid interested in one machine is not
really at the level of what they can do with it but more IMHO to what
machine they are used to play with.
My daughter (4) and my son (2) are both used to play with thepentium running
Winblows. If I show them a game on a c64 or Apple ][ or any other machine
for that matter they look at me weird and ask if they can play with the
pentium since I'm not using it...
I belive that if a kid is interested in programming (mine are not yet:( it
is better to let them choose what machine they are attracted to. I don't
know yet whether any of mine will have any interest in old machines but for
the time being I'm just happy that they show any interest at all in one of
them. What I'm trying to do is show them as much as I can (or as much as
they can take) about other machines. I'll let them choose what they want
later if they keep the interest.
I can see ten years from now trying to tell my son that the C64 had an 8X1
byte for sprites and having him replying ok but how do you do hollographic
simulation?
Of course skill learned from old machines are valuable to understand what's
going on inside of the machine but the trend today is to make abstraction of
all those _annoying_ facts and use the proper library or API. (I work with
Winblows programmers who have no clue how a computer operate)
So I say let the kid choose.
Francois.
Finally.... Jacksonville pays off.... Do you know who many times I've seen
computer x available in y, for pickup only, where y does not equal
Jacksonville. I've got two SMS 1000s comming this weekend, a model 50 and
40, and two expansion boxes (41's ???) full of serial io running RT-11 for a
defunct cardkey system.
I dont know RT-11 (yet.) and am looking forward to the experience. But
before that happens the seller wants to purge some sensitive employee files
on the system. Can someone tell me how to tell him to 1) move through the
directory structure, and 2) how to delete specific files ( some that span
partitions 0 - du4 according to him ), and...
Where can I find a good source of RT-11 info?
Thanks
- Mike: dogas(a)leading.net
I went to my favorite scrap place today and they had a Tektronix 4115B and
a 4129 that about ready to be recycled. Anyone know what the specs on
these are? They're both large desk size chassis and and huge monitors on
top. Both use 8" floppy disks. Are these somthing that needs to be saved?
Joe
In a message dated 1/12/99 7:14:45 PM EST, spc(a)armigeron.com writes:
<< What's the fallacy in putting the directory in the center of a disk?
Seems to me it would cut down on average the seek time.
-spc (The elevator algorithm favors the center of the disk in fact) >>
Well, that's how os2's HPFS puts the directory. i think it would cut down on
seek time since there wouldnt be as much movement just moving to the
outer/inner tracks.
At 01:15 PM 1/12/99 -0600, you wrote:
>laugh, you'll cry, get the book. (OK, it's a book about computer
>collecting, the only one I know of, and it includes anecdotes from a few
There is also Haddock's book of a similar name. Unfortunately, my copy has
gone missing. It's around somewhere, but Rachel has been cleaning up my
room, and I'm lucky to be able to find a clean shirt, let alone something
important like a classic computer book. 8^)
--------------------------------------------------------------------- O-
Uncle Roger "There is pleasure pure in being mad
roger(a)sinasohn.com that none but madmen know."
Roger Louis Sinasohn & Associates
San Francisco, California http://www.sinasohn.com/
> I would be interested to find out if the Apple HD20 would work with a 128k
> that had been upgraded to 512k.
It does. I was confused when I heard about people complaining that an HD20
wouldn't work with their 128, because it works fine with mine. Then I
realized that mine was upgraded to 512k.
I believe that there's not enough room in a stock 128 for the HD20 init,
plus the buffers it needs, plus the rest of the operating system, plus user
apps.
> r. r e d @ b e a r s . o r g
Paul Kearns
paulk(a)microsoft.com
> Philip.Belben(a)PowerTech.co.uk wrote about the ASCII code that was
originally
> a leftward-pointing arrow, but was later redefined as underscore:
>
>> PET has a left arrow for that code as well. Sensible, since underscore
is
>> available elswhere in the character set (shift-$ IIRC) but I never knew
it
>> used to be standard ASCII.
>
> Um, no. ASCII doesn't define any shift-$ character. In fact, ASCII
doesn't
> define any shift characters at all. It makes no association between
> characters and keystrokes. All it defines is the codes for the
characters,
> and the functions of some of the control characters. Note that even in
> the case of control characters, it does NOT define them as being
generated
> by a control key together with some other key. So, for instance, there
is
> no proper ASCII character designated "Control-C". This style of usage is
> an artifact of bit-paired keyboards, as was discussed here last week.
>
> ASCII originally did not have an underscore character. Since the 1968
> revision, it has an underscore but no leftward-pointing arrow.
>
> In any case, the Commodore PET did not use ASCII, although it used an
> extended character set that was derived from ASCII. So perhaps you are
> thinking of one of the Commodore line-drawing characters.
Despite which fact, in PET BASIC the CODE function is replaced by the ASC
function.
But I think you missed my point. Was I really that unclear? Let me
rephrase:
The decision to use left arrow for that code was sensible because the
PETSCII character set has underscore elsewhere (and I still maintain it is
at shift-$ on the PET keyboard. FWIW it is indeed one of the Commodore
line drawing characters, but I used it as an underscore in many text-based
PET applications when I programmed the machines regularly, and I still use
it as underscore in PETSCII-ASCII translation), and it would therefore be
redundant to include another underscore character in the character set.
If you ever get the chance, have a look at the layout of a PET chicklet
keyboard. It is quite clever. PETSCII, unlike ASCII, _does_ make
connections between codes for shifted keys and those for unshifted keys -
on the original PET keyboard the PETSCII code difference was always 128
(the screen code difference was always 64 BTW). And yet they managed the
following things:
Characters with horizontal lines of pixels in all eight positions followed
a simple route down and up two adjacent columns of keys, yet they managed
to get bottom (shift-$), middle (shift-@) and top (sorry, can't remember.
Shift-# ?) onto punctuation keys so they would be available in lower case
mode. Similarly with the vertical lines in all eight pixel positions.
For those pedants who say there is no middle with an 8*8 dot matrix, it was
the one that lined up with the small corners and tees (shifted numbers).
Large corners (two outer edges) were in a little block on shifted O, P, L
and colon (or possibly semicolon). Shifted O, P and L were of course
unavailable in lower case mode; shift-: became a square root sign.
And so on.
So although PETSCII is not ASCII, don't knock it. It worked well.
Philip.
PS Why is it that, whenever someone misunderstands what I say, they assume
I'm wrong, and they're right. And if their interpretation of what I say is
obviously silly, they berate me for saying something obviously silly,
rather than stopping and thinking, Can he really have meant that? Nothing
personal, I hasten to add. It happens all the time. P.
What boggles the mind is that this is a problem at all. It seems hard to
believe (in retrospect) that people really did deliberately build software
with only 2 digit years. I know it saved a few bytes, and yes, I remember
when a byte of memory was a significant amount, but still. How did standard
programming practice come to be so short sighted as to assume that software
infrastructure would be thrown out and replaced on a regular basis?
--
Jim Strickland
jim(a)DIESPAMMERSCUMcalico.litterbox.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Vote Meadocrat! Bill and Opus in 2000 - Who ELSE is there?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
I picked up an auction lot today and it contained, among other things, some
5.25" disks that are hand labelled as "1.2MB Test Media". I'm wondering if
they are calibration disks for 5.25" drives. Realizing they are probably so
RARE that to L@@K at them should cost $20 :-) Since I've got a couple I'd
like to send one to anyone who feels confident they can tell me what they
are (Tony?)
Another thing this lot had in it was the 1996 MSDN developers network
subscription CD binder. This basically has like all the "big" software
microsoft made including copies of Win95, WinNT 3.5 and WinNT 4.0 Beta.
Plus various SDKs, international versions and docs. It occurred to me that
to a developer this "trash" is going to be gold to a collector in 20 years
who is trying to demonstrate or renovate a "pre-millenium personal
computer." So it seems to be out there and it is fairly low volume (less
than 1 cubic foot) and can be had inexpensively. May I suggest we do future
collectors a favor (as those who saved OS/8 did for me) and take some of
this "junk" and store it somewhere safe for future generations...
--Chuck
Fred Cisin said...
|
|This'll probably offend many.
Maybe. I simply disagree - to an extent.
|I think that an 8 year old would be best off with a machine with CD-ROM
|capability. And a good size stack of reference disks, including
|Encyclopedia Brittanica, atlases, and several collections of literature.
What has that got to do with learning BASIC, or graphics?
The nice thing about a Commodore, CompuColor, Mac II, etc,
is the instant feedback. I realize the WWW can provide this
(so long as you have a clear T3 path between systems 8^), but
that's not the same. With a graphical basic, you create, you
play. It's more like Legos(tm) or Tinker Toys (tm) than using
a computer application.
I agree that what you propose is a good thing for a kid to have,
but it's a completely different topic - using the computer as a
general purpose learning tool, or playing on a computer. What
we were talking about was playing *with* a computer.
|For programming, I would recommend BASIC, TO START WITH, followed by an
|introduction to C and assembly as soon as basic principles are understood.
I've yet to see a BASIC that runs on top of an OS that's as
easy to get into and provides direct feedback as well as a
graphical BASIC DOS.
|Once the kid has gotten thoroughly into it, THEN maybe a birthday present
|of a set of Linux disks?
Hah. My kids started on Linux, at about 8 and 10. Yeah, I
intend to (God help me) get a Win or Mac system soon, but
only because there are too many things not yet available on
Linux.
But Linux is just fine as a newbie OS for a kid.
-Miles
