teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

This is definitely the case. It's pretty tough to find a programmer these days who has any idea of how a computer actually works, even at the assembly language level. This is something that many (most?) people think is "just fine", and some have even go so far as to fling around statements like "why should I learn to be a mechanic just to drive a car?" ...thinking that's an appropriate analogy when it's not. Looking at the state of software today proves my point beyond any shadow of a doubt. -Dave C: I hate to tell you but was always the case. Unless the programmer was working in al/ml, he didn't nor needed to know much about the innards and what was going on under the hood. Granted there was a time when you _needed_ to be something of a mechanic to get behind the wheel. But isn't that one of the natural goals of technology, to make things easier to use, and be able to devote time to other things? How many housewives (or their husbands!) know how to fix a washing machine? Some people get to poking around, and that's a good thing generally. When you advance to poking around inside your computer (w/1s and 0s or a scope/logic probe) all the better. But what does programming w/objects have to do w/interrupt vector tables??? I thought that we want to one day communicate w/our computers solely by voice.