<story><title>My boys love 1986 computing</title><url>http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9269-my-boys-love-1986-computing</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>willvarfar</author><text>I initially gave my two girls an old desktop computer with a linux on it.  They started to use it before I showed them how and they started figuring stuff out without me and soon I was sitting riveted in the background watching them discover things and trying to learn about computer UIs and work out how they thought.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s an old blog post about it: &lt;a href=&quot;http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-tech-savvy-generation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com&amp;#x2F;post&amp;#x2F;19500788060&amp;#x2F;my-te...&lt;/a&gt; - I think its a fun read.&lt;p&gt;Fast forward to now; that blog post is hopelessly out of date!&lt;p&gt;I gave them old-but-decent laptops and, eventually, internet access.&lt;p&gt;As soon as they had internet access they stopped tinkering and exploring and started only using the laptop to watch repeat episodes of childrens TV.&lt;p&gt;And now they often want to use their mum&amp;#x27;s iPad - to play music and watch TV - but they are completely utterly uninterested in tinkering with any PCs.&lt;p&gt;Its sad but its true and I wish I knew what to do about it.</text></comment>
<story><title>My boys love 1986 computing</title><url>http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9269-my-boys-love-1986-computing</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>scarygliders</author><text>There is something about 1980&amp;#x27;s-era computers which make them so much more accessable to kids than today&amp;#x27;s systems.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s probably to do with how much simpler they are - if I can put my finger on it, I&amp;#x27;d say it&amp;#x27;s because they don&amp;#x27;t have lots of Things which can tempt you to distraction; for example - if they had a web browser of some kind back then, you&amp;#x27;d be tempted away from learning to program in BASIC, or learning how to load that simple-but-fun game.&lt;p&gt;They generally were single task machines that allowed you to focus on one Thing.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m looking at my Linux desktop right now on this machine. I have a web browser I&amp;#x27;m using to type this reply. It also has 8 other tabs open - more tabs will be added later as I continue on my search for knowledge. I have a Konsole terminal open with IRC sessions to multiple servers and channels open. I have PyCharm loaded. I have a VM running, and more to run later. All vying for my time and energy. A child using this machine would be overwhelmed.&lt;p&gt;Even a Raspberry Pi can distract the user of it in the same manner as my desktop.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it&amp;#x27;s time to reintroduce kids today to the CoCo2&amp;#x27;s, the VIC-20&amp;#x27;s, the C64&amp;#x27;s, the Spectrums, the ZX81&amp;#x27;s and so on. Perhaps getting kids to use single-task-at-a-time systems to learn instead of the distraction-inducing tech. of today, would be a very good idea.&lt;p&gt;When my son was 2.5 years old, I put in front of him an ancient old Compaq laptop running Debian. It had Tuxpaint running on it, and I just put it in front of him and let him go on it. Within a short space of time he was using Tuxpaint like a &amp;quot;pro&amp;quot;, and then he learned how to power the machine up, and type in his login name and password. Sure, you can do this with today&amp;#x27;s systems, but they do make it so easy to provide tons of distractions.</text></comment>