Expectations

What was your first real encounter with a computer? How did it shape your learning experience with computers of the following 20 years?

When I was twelve years old and about to start at secondary school my uncle bought a Sinclair ZX-81. At his house he demonstrated the awesome power available:

10 LET EGGS=10
20 PRINT 6*EGGS

Well, okay, maybe that wasn’t quite awesome power, but it suggested that there was more to this black box than met the eye. A few weeks later my computer science education started in the world of Commodore PETs and a Research Machine 380Z. Graphics by pokeing memory, Space Invaders and the “joys” of PIP all lay ahead.

Later on I acquired the ZX-81 from my uncle and purchased a wobbly 16k RAM pack before being gifted with a BBC Micro Model B by my parents (for Christmas when I was fourteen). With the exception of the odd visit to a Dragon 32 or Oric 1, these machines defined my computing experience until I started visiting universities whilst choosing a degree course.

UMIST had Perq and Sun machines. The colour graphics on the Sun were particularly impressive - it was kept in a small darkened room to increase the sense of awe. Imperial seemed much the same, so it was a bit of a let down to be shown to a Freedom 101 terminal on my first day in the IC Department of Computing. rvax and svax (both 11/750 as I recall) had been upgraded to a new release of BSD Unix that summer and they became the focus of my computing interest for the next year. Sure there was the odd flirtation with a Mac Plus and some IBM AT machines, but the VAX had me hooked.

In the second year we were given access to the new lab full of Sun 3/60 machines with SunView, though the cool kids quickly figured out how to get X Windows version 10 running. Steve Lacey still had the source to our VLSI editor group project a few years ago - Rob Pike’s bitblt function seemed both scary and powerful while we figured out how to use it.

Between then and now things have changed both a lot and a little. Unix workstations running the X Window System are still my daily tools, though we’ve moved from monochrome to 24 bit colour and graphics cards have more memory than the original fileserver had disk space. Emacs is still a great editor, though it was sometimes painful back when two people shared one of those 3/60s.

The purpose of this short tale is to explain how I got from saving hand-typed assembler programs on cassette tape to here, and how I had pretty low expectations of computers initially, which have grown as time has gone by. My oldest son is now eleven years old, but his initial encounters with computing are markedly different from my own. He has game consoles and a Windows XP computer. PRINT 6*EGGS probably wouldn’t cut much ice, and I know that 3D Monster Maze would seem bizarre compared to the games on his mobile phone.

With the ZX-81 there was a sense that you could produce something that rivaled the results of a “professional”. Magazines were filled with programs written by teenagers that did interesting things, whether it was a skiing game, household accounts or just interesting patterns on the screen. There was no reason to think that you couldn’t just dive in and have a go.

How do I engender that same sense of interest in my son? Any attempt a programming will look pretty shabby next to Revenge of the Sith. Even worse, I have this theory that it would be better to learn in a more formalised manner - Lisp rather than Basic (at some point I should write an entry about how teaching Modula-2 to first year undergraduates was a crime, but not now). Maybe a Logo variant would be more appropriate?

It seems that his experience with computers means that he has much higher expectations of what should be possible. That’s a good thing, but it seems that consequence of this is a much steeper learning curve before anything he can recognise results from his efforts.