Carl Cerecke wrote:
Nick Rout wrote:
On Fri, 04 Feb 2005 10:11:41 +1300 (NZDT) Steve Holdoway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
luxury, the first computer i used had to be bootstrapped with a hex keypad then loaded from hand fed punch cards or a paper tape reader. the output was a row of led's until you got the os loaded, then you got a teletype.
http://www.pdp11.org ???
Those were the days. burble burble... real computers... burble... youth of today...
it was a computer built by engineering dept at Auckland uni and donated to nelson college (presumably by an old boy engineer). Lissajous patterns on a 80 column teletype *sigh* (we used a lot of the rolls of teletype paper)
Actually the real gun on it was Tim Bell, now an Assoc Professor of Comp Sci at Canterbury Uni, and i understand a friend of this group when it comes to installfests etc :-)
As far as I can recall, the computer at Nelson College was more of a "status symbol" than something that was really used for educational purposes. Perhaps the teacher who related that to me was just cynical.
Nelson seems to have it's fair share of geeks. Another Comp Sci lecturer at Canterbury, Richard Pascoe, also went there, as did I. When I was there, we were using BBC machines, plus a handful of Acorn Archimedes machines (running RISCos) for privileged few. We were taught BASIC in the 6th form. Do they teach programming at all at High School these days?
Well we had in 6th form (last year) a caluclator that had something like basic on it. I had to teach my teacher how to use functions like integration with this calculator. ;)
They also do at some stage (early high school) Logo for the more interested and call that programing. In Germany they have from year 9-13 informatic lessons. From year 9 to 10 they played Half Life most of the time and later they even do Delphi. It's not much better there.
Cheers, Carl.
-- Happy Hacking, Robert
Use free software only. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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