30 Jul
2010
30 Jul
'10
3:18 p.m.
Hi Tom,
You are actually posting to an international mailing list...
Also, could you please learn to use the 'delete line' function in your
editor. Some of us are one slow dial-up connections, and I don't see any
need to download a second copy of messages I've already seen.
Nice idea.=20
Now lets think a moment, that your son fell in love with writing =
software
during your project.
You teach him pretty old stuff, so he find himself back in the 80's, and =
his
friend calling him 'grandpa'.....
Maybe it's a better approach to start out with modern equipment, I will =
give
you a link.
This is modern hardware, like boards built in the smartphones, you can
create pretty little apps and you almost learn something about hardware =
step
by step.
After that, your son finds himself in 2011 and if he look around for =
some
job, he will be welcome to companies. I think, he isn't that interesting =
for
companies, when he notes down 'Skills in Z80 Assembler and CP/M'. Maybe =
the
people there didn't know what he talking about ....
There are several points here...
Firstly, I would assume you did many things in your yonger days which had
nothing to do with getting a job. If not, I feel rather sorry for you.
And I would hope your parents did things with you that had nothing to do
with you getting a job (if not, I feel they were not giving you the
childhood you deserved!). You can think of building an N8VEM as something
like that. An entertainment, not directly related to getting skills an
emplyer would want.
But actually, if _I was looking to employ somebody, I would pick the guy
who'd programmed in assembler, who'd soldered up his own hardware, etc in
an instant. Even if I didn't need those skills, it would indicate
somebody who was (a) interested in the subject and (b) probably
understood the fundamentals. And I would much rather work with somebody
like that than somebody who claims to know the latest languate/OS, but
really hasn't a clue as to what's really going on.
The problem with much modern stuff (I have not looked at the boards you
suggest) is that they come pre-built (so you don't get to learn how to
track down hardware faults),. the chips are in hard-to-solder pacakages
(yes, I do claim you can solder anything apart from BGAs iwth a normal
soldering iron, but when you're strting out, through-hole DIPs are a bit
easier than fine-pitch PQFPs), the hardware is likely to be hidden inside
a few large chips (so you can't proble interesting signals, etc.
And the sofgtearer is likely to be too complicated to write in assembly
language. So you corss develop it on some other machine, writing in C,
say. If it works,g reat. But if it doesn't work, you can't look at the
bianry file you're feeding to the target system and work out what's going
on.
Oh, don;t get me wrong, C is great. But I don't think this is
particularly educational.
-tony