News TNMOC hosts retro-coding lessons

The National Museum of Computing has played host to an interesting experiment in retro coding.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/08/26/tnmoc-hosts-retro-coding-lessons/1

 

Problem is, it's not going to make users do fewer stupid things.

Nice idea, if unlikely to be well received by any but us "enthusiasts"

 

Awesome idea. I learnt to code on a BBC Micro, first with BASIC then with assembly language, and it really doesn't get closer to the metal than that. Even just using the machine required an understanding of using a command line. Then I progressed to the Acorn Archimedes with its RISC instruction set and learnt assembly all over again. Then I moved on to a 386 and had all the fun of dealing with the command line, batch files, extended memory headaches, qBASIC, and progressed to Pascal and C/C++. God I'm showing my age! Anyway, that basis gave me a solid understanding of the principles common to all computing systems, that anyone learning about computers by using a modern PC would simply never get.

For writing practical programs, modern systems are all very well - you can put together an app with a GUI that does something useful in about 10 lines of code, but it shows you nothing about all the stuff going on to actually make it work - memory allocation, resource management, threading / time-slicing and all the complexities of a modern multitasking graphical OS on modern hardware (multiple cores, processing on multiple platforms - GPU, CPU etc.) mean that writing in pure assembly would be totally impractical and that layers of APIs are needed to make things work, but all that abstraction obscures the important issue (for a computing student) of HOW things work.

 

I promised myself I would never say anything this lame on the Internet without it somehow being sarcastic and cutting to some poor idiot, but I'm going to say it anyway.

ZOMG!! PDP-8!!!

Okay, I've got the over-enthusiasm out of my system, normal operation shall resume shortly after I find some sedatives.

 

In my uni course we had a module on basic computing, we went from building a simple counting circuit (where the 'clock' was me moving a wire between two connections) up to basic coding in assembly on something so old I didn't recognise it . Really helped me get an idea of the more low level stuff.

 

Started with Basic on a Commodore C16

But ehhh:

Weeelllll, Basic does that. MS-DOS does that. HECK, Linux does that till the day of today.

They could learn this on a modern system (something unix based without the desktop loaded)

 

Great idea imo! This is certainly something I would benefit from. While my programming knowledge is abysmal, I would still love to learn more about how computers actually work.

 

It's a good idea to do some low-level programming even if it's a little frustrating sometimes, it gives you a better appreciation for high-level languages and increases your knowledge of the underlying CPU and memory processes.

I think that programming in binary is a step too far and a pointless exercise at best. Programming in the assembly language of a simple RISC architecture is a better idea and teaches you the concepts of the stored program model we use on computers today. You can also do this in an emulator of some sort on any modern computer.

 

ah now that's a good class.. poke and peek registers =] when I was a kid I think I memorized most of the common registers used on the atari 800xl you had msb (most significant byte) and lsb for some and you always used variables to save memory.. fun stuff

 

Pah, we learn assembler in electronics.

Also, since when did ICT actually become about computers?

It seems like a good idea though. More people need to learn how computers actually work.

 

"Also, since when did ICT actually become about computers?"

I think since far too many people think learning office means they are a computer wizz, as that's all ICT seems to basically concentrate on.

Learnt BASIC on my Speccy, then again on the BBC, then again on the C64!! - still have my programmers reference guide for the C64. although most of the POKE and PEEK commands I used were for unlimited lives in games etc.

 

I went Spectrum -> QBasic -> Some Casio calculator basic variant -> VBA ->SQL + C#


with the odd other little bit here and there

 

My first bit of programming was on a ZX Spectrum +3 with 128 KB RAM!

But I'm not sure you need to go back that far .. so long as you learn how to use C properly (Malloc, Pointers, Garbage Collection) you will be miles ahead of the competition.

 

I think it's a fantastic idea. Although I suspect the fact the course went down well means the participants were, shall we say, 'cherry picked'.

We did assembly / binary when I was at college, and no where near enough of it imho. Still having knowledge of how things work, and the mental structure for dealing with things from the base up has really helped me immensely in the commerical world.