Back

@kkarhan @cstross I remember the old Amstrads starting to show up for newer kids when I was at [special needs] school. They were awful, but who cares about damaging kids' necks?

@flippac @cstross I mean it's obvious shit like #Astrohaus is a #grift aimed at exploiting #TechIlliterate #GareGivers and #Parents who don't know better.

It's like a lot of shit solutions pushed towards #disabled and #needy people.

Speaking of "breaking childrens necks":
We could've had all the #Schoolbooks as #ePub textbooks over 25 years ago but #Texbook #Publishers refused to make that possible, so kids lugged around up to 20kg of books depending on their schedule and homework assignments.

@cstross @kkarhan Yeah, my dad had one back in the day (and LocoScript) - I'm talking about the much later "glorified calculator with a text editor and a few other hardcoded apps" flat ones with an LCD strip a few lines deep as a display. Around in the mid-90s.

The second laptop of my school run was actually up to running Quake just about (and obviously I spent no class time modding it), but what had started out as strictly a fix for my handwriting issues had become, amongst other things, where I was writing music in a way the school was barely used to being possible...

@flippac @kkarhan Oh, *them*. The NC100 ("what if we copy the Z88 only make it brain-dead?") and NC200 ("now let's add a washed-out 16x80 blue-grey LCD flip-up screen and a floppy disk drive: also C-cell batteries to stretch your arm murscles").

The Z88's Pipedream software was at least weird and original (as you'd expect from Sinclair).

@cstross @kkarhan Luckily for the local educational authority (who, tbf, I'm pretty sure hated my entire family: they brought that on themselves) there was no conversation like:

Them: Can you tell us what you think of this computer?
Me: I'm not sure I can find the words
Them: Communicate however you need
Me: Are you absolutely sure?

...and not just because back then I would've delivered the last line deadpan because I couldn't not, and there's a risk they wouldn't realise what I was asking until I'd already put the screen through the nearest table corner!

@flippac @kkarhan Feeling my age here: when I was in sixth form my school got its first computer lab—a Systime 525 Concurrent CP/M box with 8" floppies and a DECWriter teletype as well as the console screen/keyboard, and three Apple IIs with 48K each. Oh, and shiny new 5.25" floppy drives! Even a UCSD Pascal compiler!

@cstross @kkarhan Turbo Pascal 5.5 was my first compiler, but I don't know if that's helping or hurting. Not for the laptop (the first one ran DOS Word).

@flippac @kkarhan TP5.5 was a pretty neat language. I started with TP4, which was the first to have the modern-layout IDE. TP5.0 added a source level debugger (which was bliss to discover) and TP5.5 added classes and OOP features. But even TP4 was a step up from original Pascals—it had dynamic strings. (Original Pascal gave you a Char and expected you to roll your own using arrays.)

@cstross @kkarhan I'm currently punting on "do I add a string type?" in a language that's designed for writing [toy-for-academia] typecheckers. Admittedly the real punt is that it's already got Lisp-style atoms (or close enough) and enough to build lists in a manner completely idiomatic for my audience, but I'm damned if I'm just adding a Char and calling it a day.

Even if odds are I'll add Char, String and give String to/from functions to that list-of-Char representation for doing anything more complicated than checking if two strings are equal...

edit to add: yes, yes I do have reasons to keep the language small. I don't need strings at all for typechecking per se...

@flippac @cstross Okay, I'm checking out...