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by doodlebugging 494 days ago
Still OT but a nice segue that jogs my memories of the first PCs that I had available. A friend's Dad bought him a Compaq Deskpro that looked a lot like a portable sewing machine with QuickBASIC and my parents bought me a 128k Mac and QuickBASIC for the Mac. We jointly developed software using QuickBASIC that ran under Apple's System5? OS and various DOSes in PC land (DRDOS, OS/2, DOS2-5, Windows 286 and 3.1, etc).

I think that if you initiated your plan to send those tablets, etc that you should consider sending late 90's model tablets (there weren't many tablet style computers until the 90's I think) with period correct software since a lot of the personal computers, OSes and programming languages available for the 80's rigs required use of multiple disks due to memory and hard drive space constraints.

Far too many times I would be in the middle of an operation and be met with a prompt to load a specific disk from the set of disks for the software that I was using so that the software could perform some operation that wouldn't fit in memory on the disks that had already been read. If you passed them around to kids today they might quickly lose interest in the process. You could of course use those old school PCs to help teach them something of computer architecture and operations so that they can more easily grasp the functionality than if they were handed modern rigs with huge hard drives and zero disk space issues so that things run so quickly there is no time to teach about Disk I/O, clock speeds, etc.

Anyway, thanks for this.
1 comments
wruza 494 days ago
Yeah, I meant “style”, not literal 80s tech. I’m just used to subtracting a few years due to growing up in the location that had everything too late. I think that for learning the pre-IBM-PC spirit would be the best. Basically a ROM BASIC style “OS” with an SSD chip as RAM+ROM and some mainstream embedded CPU chip. Flat everything, but in abundance. The key idea here is to give them INKEY, LINE,BF and PSET before they learn to integrate a payment widget into their wordpress deployment.
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