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Hacker News Hacker NewsI've been feeling lately that as computers have become more advanced and software has become more inscrutable, our relationship with our computers has changed, for the worse. This essay hit home for me: https://explaining.software/archive/transparent-like-frosted...
These old-school computers viewed their users as creators, as developers. Modern computers (read: smartphones) _are_ the users, and the "used" are just ad-watching revenue cows. I passionately hate this arrangement.
When I have children, I want them to know what computing should feel like---empowering, creative and stimulating, not controlled, consumptive, compulsive and mindless. I want to give them a computer that builds up their spirit, rather than grinding it down.
I think this computer should have several qualities:
0. The computer should be about _creation_ and not consumption.
1. The computer should be _local_, not global. Intranet should be prioritized over Internet.
1.5 A corollary, the computer should be _personal_. It should encourage and reward in-person interaction, physical sharing of information and programs, and short-range connection between computers.
2. The computer should be _limited_. Because the medium is the message, we have to restrict the capabilities of our media to better promote the messages we value.
2.5. A corollary, the computer should be _text-oriented_. Graphics shouldn't be impossible, but text should be primary. The computer should cultivate a typographic mind, not a graphic mind (in Marshall McLuhan's terminology).
3. The computer should be _focused_. It should never distract you from what you want to work on.
4. The computer should be _reactive_, not proactive. It should never give you a notification. You should be in charge of retrieving all information yourself, like a library, not a call center.
5. The computer should be _physical_. It should be oriented around physical media.
6. The computer should be _modifiable_. It should encourage and reward inspection into its internals, and be easy to change.
7. The computer should be _simple_, understandable by a single person in its entirety with time and study.
The Mega65 is amazing and checks these boxes, but unfortunately it's a tad expensive for me. What other machines are out there like this?
The reason it worked so well was the cursor control characters. Just by printing a string, for example, you could draw an outline box with text in it, or a little man, or whatever, in an instant.
The speed of BASIC was still an issue. I animated a train driving across the screen, about 10 characters high, and it worked fairly well but you could see a bit of a ripple. I don't remember how exactly, but, for example, each 1-character wide "slice" of the train could be a string, then you just print your 40 "slice" strings in a row and there's your train; pick your starting offset in a larger array to draw it in different phases of motion.
A faster CPU totally solves this. Now you have a machine where non-programmers can do really cool graphic stuff and smoothly too, without ever leaving BASIC.
The next step, generally, was about reprogramming the character set. Now your BASIC, character cell based graphics could have custom pixels, not just the preformed PETSCII characters.
I once saw a cute little character based platform jumper game on someone's VIC20 and went home and implemented it, from scratch, on the C64 in an afternoon. In BASIC, with a few custom characters.
But what may be missing in this retro scene is being able to show off your creations to everyone else who has the same computer. Without that, kids may not get interested.
https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/media/pdf/ca/ca/31/Mega65-P...
They are available in 8, 16, 24 and 32-bit systems with a variety of CPUs such as the 65c02, 6809, 65816, 68000, or 68040.
Main website: https://c256foenix.com/
A program most nerds (including me) used to run on every computer we came across in department stores back in the 80’s. The salesmen must have been sick to death of kids doing this all day every day – some of the messages weren’t always so polite either!
As a diehard Amiga fan, I would always stop at the Macs on display at office supply stores and switch the color setting from "thousands of colors" to grayscale. Just doing my part.
In programming class at school, we'd be taught for a bit, then go to the computers to practice what we'd learned in BASIC. When class was over, we'd write programs to loop for maybe 15 minutes, then emit an obnoxious sound to interrupt the next class. Ideally, the chosen frequency would be high enough that the teacher couldn't hear it, but the class could. Truly madlads.
Now where’d I leave those Galaksija resistors…