Teaching kids about computers...

On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 06:45:32PM -0500, Ray Arachelian wrote: I built plenty of add-on devices for the User Port and the joystick ports when I was a teenager (I got my hands on my first C-64 when I was 15, and by 16, I owned one). How deep do you mean here? It's a little tougher to find a cartridge-port proto board than it used to be, so building your own SCSI or IDE or Ethernet interface from scratch might be somewhat advanced, but hanging LEDs or switches off of one of the other ports is easy enough, and easy enough to control from BASIC. How is C-64 BASIC bad compared to PET BASIC? They are virtually identical. Do you mean because the PET lacks a SID chip and sprites and bitmapped graphics, the BASIC is "better"? As did BASIC 2 and BASIC 4 PETs (just not the original chicklet-keyboard PET - on that one, you had to load the monitor from tape). The ML monitor on PETs was nice to have - better IMO than a blue "READY" screen - but anyone who was serious about it gave up one of their two or three precious expansion ROM sockets for a better monitor. ISTR SuperMon was pretty good. I forget what I have in my 2001-32N, but one nice feature is that it would assemble and disassemble on the fly - scroll up or down to rip though memory. I used that monitor to write a ML Scott Adams Adventure runtime in high school (i.e. - it's good enough for programs larger than the cassette buffer, especially if you don't have a disk drive and a proper symbolic assembler). I think the PET is a great teaching machine for kids, but I admit that I'm biased - the first machine I got to use, and the first machine I owned, was a PET. Given the costs, decreasing availability, etc., of the PETs and PET peripherals, I would probably recommend the C-64 in its place. There were millions and millions of them made, they are still abundant and inexpensive, and they have many of the same features that make the PET interesting, and only lack a small number (like the built-in ML monitor). If you desire a greater hardware angle than a packaged system provides, there are a number of recent reimplementations of classic designs - I've built the Elf 2000, along with many of its peripherals, and I have a MicroKIM here, and am gathering parts. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 25-Nov-2007 at 02:10 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -30.5 F (-34.7 C) Windchill -30.5 F (-34.7 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 0.0 kts Grid 265 Barometer 678.8 mb (10674 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html