Rick Chagouri-Brindle wrote:
>
> Dilwyn Jones wrote:
>> My son is 12 now and VERY into his computers (as you might expect of a
>> son of mine!). This Christmas, he got a little £60 Aiptek digital
>> video camera, spent most of Christmas day recording his mum, dad,
>> grandparents etc and made a very good half hour video of it all (with
>> Windows Movie Maker, which was a traumatic learning experience until
>> we realised we had to set Windows Virtual Memory to a massive 1GB to
>> edit a video at a snail's pace on a 1.4GHz Pentium, which makes me
>> very glad of what we are able to achieve at a few MHz on a QL
>> sometimes) which is now on DVD doing the rounds of the family!
>>
>>
> I can really empathise with that! I have two boys one almost five and
> the other is three and a half! The five year old got a laptop for his
> third birthday! Some might call that extreme, but it was a secondhand P4
> which I was able to upgrade with all the bits and boys I had accumulated
> over 15 years in IT! He had been showing such an interest in my PCs and
> more than that even at that early age an ability to use the mouse, click
> on icons, even load the right disks for his games and education
> programs! Having two very competitive boys very close in age, I took the
> precaution of getting a second laptop at the same time as the first - an
> identical model - and putting it away until we judged the younger lad
> was ready. Well, that happened this Christmas and both boys now are
> having great fun playing their games and surfing their (restricted to
> permitted sites) internet. It amazes me how quickly children pick things
> up in this day and age but good luck to them! The nearly five year old
> got a digital camera for Christmas and he has been taking photos of
> everything and everyone and now can upload the photos to his laptop
> without help! In fact, after a disappointing response to the ad for my
> assistant's role at work, i am thinking of offering him the job!!!
> _______________________________________________
Give it to Ben (8-)#
Ben started at about 2! He was using my laptop which was a 386-030 mono.
There was a superb dinosaur DOS program that imitated English (speaking
dinosaurs!) amazingly well through the system piezo 'speaker'.
It loaded off floppy at boot, but the idiots asked two questions:
1) VGA (y/n)
2) sound (y/n)
Other than that idiocy, all the rest was fine for a 2 year old and he
had great fun. I wrote a program to pipe in the answers from a file, so
he did not need to try to learn to read and type *that* early (8-)#
Starting kids early with *anything* is always a good idea.
Ben has turned into a brilliant programmer. He has been earning
thousands a year since he was about 12 from the company I work for
(Worldnews). Get one of your offspring to design a VOIP system for you
home. Ben has set up Asterisk for me, and I can now make and receive
calls anywhere on the internet using my home phone.
He has also set up mythtv which not only provides a 3 tuner digital
terrestrial system under Linux, but anyone on the local network can view
live TV and recordings etc.
You just wait!!!
Tony
--
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