networkworld.com has an article celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Atari 800. To quote them, "... It's the 30th anniversary of this 8-bit PC classic. We celebrate the occasion as we always do, by tearing the product apart and showing you the pieces. ..."
This is relevant for me in that I learned how to write programs initially on the old Atari 8-bit computers. Sort of by accident. When you didn't have a cartridge loaded, the BASIC interpreter came up. There's only so many times you can look at the prompt and wonder what the heck it's for. So I started typing into the BASIC interpreter and tried to make sense of the errors it spat back. Eventually I worked out that you could create subroutines and so forth, and found some information on how to write programs. Good times. It was fun to create your own things.
This ties in, for me, directly with the reason for running computer clubs. Namely, as the "Why Johnny can't code" article from Salon points out, "BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming." Go buy a computer - PC, Mac, whatever. Where's the ability to create things on it that comes with the computer and is easily accessible? Where's the free BASIC programming language or Scratch or Squeak or Alice or Greenfoot or BlueJ or NetBeans or Java Development Kit? Hmm, there seems to be a trial subscription to McAfee anti-something-or-other... It's not there. You have to know where to find those things.
I love the idea that the One Laptop Per Child has built-in. It's a button. When you press the button, you can see (and modify!) the code to what you're doing. David Pogue shows you how at time index 2:20 right here. Proprietary vs. open source discussions aside, how basic of a kid thing is this? "How does this work? Oh, here, press this button and find out for yourself, take it apart, look at the guts... change it..." Apart from that, the OLPC machine comes with Python, Forth, JavaScript, Csound, Squeak Etoys, and so on. So there's no question about having something available on the machine to learn by doing, to create things instead of wonder why you're staring at a dialog asking you to purchase the full version of anti-something-or-other which has now expired 30 days after purchase.
The thing I find most interesting about the OLPC program is it is "an education program" and not "a laptop program." If you look at what people think the underlying device for this "education program" might look like in about three years, best guesses are a device that has the following characteristics:
- will be “more like a sheet of paper”
- total cost of ownership for the device, including Internet connectivity, is around $1 per week per child
- completely plastic and unbreakable
- waterproof
- 1/4" thick
- full color, reflective and transmissive, no bezel, no holes
- consumes 1 Watt of power
- costs $75
- can be ready in 2012
- No cost connectivity will start up with the ITU in Geneva
- The ITU is the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva, working to bring high-speed Internet service to at least half of the world's population by 2015
Which to me sounds a lot like Alan Kay's "dynabook" concept, which would be an ok improvement over my venerable old Atari 800. Which, as it turns out for me, the Atari 800 wasn't so much a "desktop computer project" as it was an "education project."
