[dtengineering]

My avatar is a Commodore PET 4032. 40 character wide screen... 32 kB of RAM. Made in Canada! You could get a floppy drive for them... but they cost a fortune. Mostly our programs were saved and loaded from audio cassette tapes. Type in "load", press "play" and wait five or ten minutes.

They cost a fair bit back in the '70's but our local high school had one and my Dad, a teacher there, could take turns taking it home on the weekend to learn how to use it. I'm not sure how many hours I spent down in the basement with a manual and computer magazines figuring out how to write code in BASIC.

There weren't many people around to teach programming, at least in northern BC, in those days, and there certainly was no internet to go to for advice.

But it was a fabulous time to learn programming because the expectations were so low. If you could make a COMPUTER do SOMETHING... ANYTHING... it was considered pretty impressive. If you could make it do what you wanted it to do, well... that was even better.

When Zork and Space Invaders were high tech, it wasn't too hard for one person, working alone in their basement, to come up with an impressive game or application.

That's why I like teaching programming using robots and microcontrollers. Most people have no preconceptions of what a robot or microcontroller should be able to do... so programming a $2.00 PIC to receive an IR remote control signal and drive a mini sumo robot is seen as "impressive", even though it is a reasonably simple task.

But regardless of the platform or language, there is no substitute for hours upon hours of creating, troubleshooting, modifying and debugging your own code.

Jason