Kids react to Apple II

[Bixler]

I know it's really dumb, but maybe some here might enjoy it:

 

 

Cheers!

 

EDIT: Really fucked up the title, something else was on my mind. Oh well.

Edited May 26, 2014 by Bixler

[Keatah]

Looks like today's computers made those kids stupid.

[CatPix]

Because witouth instructions manuals and no other machine around working the same, you were more clever with a micro of the 80's when you saw one?

 

Those kids have been used to GUIs and not dealing with the guts of their computers since they got one (and lots of them are, I think, simply too young to care about such details).

[Osgeld]

I like the one kid at the when asked if he would like to have one "yea its kind of cool"

and the gril who said "its better than flappy bird"

 

I know its just kids but I wish it was explained to them a little more though

[DesertJets]

This wasn't as bad as the walkman episode, but I do generally hate those kids. They all scream child actors to me. But you can't fault them the technology is totally alien to them, each of those kids were born after 2000 after all.

[fast eddie]

When I was a kid our elementary school got a bunch of Apple IIs brand new. It was probably '81 or '82. I would have had no idea how to use the things if the teacher hadnt loaded the programs and supervised us for the on screen commands. I'm not sure if I would have seen an arcade game, atari 2600, or VCR by that time.

 

Kids these days are much more tech savvy than when I was growing up. I've seen kids use a smart phone better than I can.

 

My biggest memory of using those Apple II's were Lemonade stand and that dreaded green screen. I tried playing some games on a apple II emulator recently with that green screen, and its really bad on the eyes.

[Keatah]

Kids these days are much more tech savvy than when I was growing up. I've seen kids use a smart phone better than I can.

They can push colorful buttons and react to on-screen activity. The phone and its infrastructure are operating them. And the parent think little tyke is a genius. If you spent as much time with a phone or tablet as they do you'd be an expert look-alike too.

 

 

When I was a kid our elementary school got a bunch of Apple IIs brand new. It was probably '81 or '82. I would have had no idea how to use the things if the teacher hadnt loaded the programs and supervised us for the on screen commands. I'm not sure if I would have seen an arcade game, atari 2600, or VCR by that time.

I had to actually read the "Apple II Reference Manual" and other included documentation when I was a kid; in order to learn about the RF modulator and various ways to boot the machine or even use a cassette. And I was goddamned PROUD of myself and thoroughly enjoyed all the commensurate rewards & benefits of doing so. Can you imagine that happening today? I think not!

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.com/pub/apple_II/documentation/misc/a2_reference_manual_alt.pdf

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.com/pub/apple_II/documentation/hardware/storage/disks/The%20DOS%20Manual_HQ.pdf

 

 

This wasn't as bad as the walkman episode, but I do generally hate those kids. They all scream child actors to me.

You bet they're child actors alright. And the show is scripted no doubt.

[ApolloBoy]

Looks like today's computers made those kids stupid.

[flashjazzcat]

They can push colorful buttons and react to on-screen activity. The phone and its infrastructure are operating them. And the parent think little tyke is a genius.

Absolutely. I keep hearing parents saying their little consumers are computer whiz-kids because they can play Angry Birds for three hours at a time without a break. Such observations have many (depressing) implications, none of which seem to point to the children having exceptional technical insight. They would, however (when viewed alongside the increased number of OAPs and other uninitiated users who are now able to navigate the Internet, email, etc, using tablets) suggest that computers are now very easy to use and that computers have attained the status of household appliance. Give them a VCR and ask them to program that; something for which I held sole responsibility as a child.

[Greg2600]

When I was a kid our elementary school got a bunch of Apple IIs brand new. It was probably '81 or '82. I would have had no idea how to use the things if the teacher hadnt loaded the programs and supervised us for the on screen commands. I'm not sure if I would have seen an arcade game, atari 2600, or VCR by that time.

 

Kids these days are much more tech savvy than when I was growing up. I've seen kids use a smart phone better than I can.

 

My biggest memory of using those Apple II's were Lemonade stand and that dreaded green screen. I tried playing some games on a apple II emulator recently with that green screen, and its really bad on the eyes.

 

My cousin gave me a used Atari 400 computer and disk drive sometime around 1985 or 86, when I was maybe 7. Remembering commands was too much. Using the keyboard was too much. All I wanted to do was plug it in, and turn it on, and here's the game. So I never used it, and my mom threw it out. We had Apple II's in school as well, although you didn't get to use them until maybe 4th grade? So maybe I was 9 or 10 around 87/88, but I did like using the Apple's for games. Then Apple and ShopRite supermarket run a scheme where your parents turned in receipts at ShopRite, and the school got vouchers towards buying new computers. This was in 1990. I was hoping for maybe a newer Apple, or a Tandy, or Amiga, something more powerful. Unfortunately, the school spent tons of money on brand new Apple II's!!!! We were all furious, and my life long hatred of Apple products began. The school was duped into buying that obsolete garbage.

[MarkO]

<< SNIP >>

 

 

I had to actually read the "Apple II Reference Manual" and other included documentation when I was a kid; in order to learn about the RF modulator and various ways to boot the machine or even use a cassette. And I was goddamned PROUD of myself and thoroughly enjoyed all the commensurate rewards & benefits of doing so. Can you imagine that happening today? I think not!

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.com/pub/apple_II/documentation/misc/a2_reference_manual_alt.pdf

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.com/pub/apple_II/documentation/hardware/storage/disks/The%20DOS%20Manual_HQ.pdf

 

 

<< SNIP >>

My High School had Four Apple ][ + computers with 48K and the ROM Card with Integer BASIC on it.

 

Three of them were in the Business Classroom, whom the teacher was a friend of my dad's, so I was able to "Borrow" all the Apple Manuals and the Epson MX-80 Manual... You sure learn a lot by reading the Fine Manuals...

 

[Nebulon]

When I was a kid our elementary school got a bunch of Apple IIs brand new. It was probably '81 or '82. I would have had no idea how to use the things if the teacher hadnt loaded the programs and supervised us for the on screen commands. I'm not sure if I would have seen an arcade game, atari 2600, or VCR by that time.

 

Kids these days are much more tech savvy than when I was growing up. I've seen kids use a smart phone better than I can.

 

My biggest memory of using those Apple II's were Lemonade stand and that dreaded green screen. I tried playing some games on a apple II emulator recently with that green screen, and its really bad on the eyes.

 

I had a similar experience in grade 2 or 3 (it was around 1979). A computer-savvy teacher introduced the class to an Apple ][ computer and proceeded to ask us if anyone knew how to bring up a file listing (he was smiling, thinking that no one would know how). A friend of mine put up his hand, went up to the machine and typed CATALOG. The teacher was pretty surprised by that (as was the class, because the rest of us had no idea). Turns out my friend's dad was a physics prof and they had one at home. I spent a lot of time at his house playing around on that machine.

 

As for kids being more tech savvy today, I should mention what a present-day colleague of mine said about the course that he used to be an assembly-language T.A. for. The college he worked for changed its curriculum over time and got rid of its Atari ST machines and stopped teaching 68000 assembly language. In fact, they didn't really bother to replace it with a thorough grounding in how computers and interfaces really work at the code level. After a number of years of seeing students finish the course under the new curriculum, he told me that if he were to know of any mission-critical systems that the new grads has written code for, he would be sure to avoid the systems that they worked on (e.g. high-speed trains, hospitals, etc...). He just didn't trust their ability to come up with something remotely efficient or reliable.

[fast eddie]

I had little access to computers of any kind until probably the mid eighties. Even then I was more interested in seeing what games someone I knew with a C64 had compared to how they actually worked. I think I could have benefited a great deal with some kind of machine, even if it had been a outdated Vic-20.

 

I'm all for teaching computer basics in the earlier grades. Even better yet if it was on vintage machines without all the modern bells and whistles they have now. Those electronic and radio kits they use to sell at Radioshack would be an invaluable learning tool to. I certainly wish I had more of an interest in them growing up. It does help when your around someone alot interested in those things growing up, of course.

[jaybird3rd]

Young people who have grown up with tablets and laptops are certainly well-rehearsed in using them for common tasks, partly because they have become acclimated to the ways these technologies are usually designed, but that does not mean that they should be considered "tech savvy" in any meaningful sense. One wouldn't call someone "car savvy" just because they use their car to drive to and from work every day, even though they never open the hood or change their own tires. In calling someone "car savvy", we usually mean that the person knows something about cars, not merely that they've become superficially competent in using them. I think the same distinction needs to be made in assigning labels like "tech savvy".

In the time that I've been teaching college students about computers, I've come to realize that many of the stereotypes often maintained by older people (including "Gen-Xers" like myself) about "Millenials" are badly mistaken. In particular, not only are the majority of them not "tech savvy", but a majority of them do not even consider themselves to be "tech savvy". Admittedly, they come into classes like mine thinking that they know more about computers than they actually do, so I have to spend a certain amount of time moving them beyond their assumptions and guiding them to think about computers in new ways, but that's also true to some extent of lots of other subjects.

Looking back at vintage computers like the Apple ][ and their use in schools is a bit like looking back at the McGuffey Readers. It's easy to skim through the advanced McGuffey volumes today and conclude that all American elementary school students of the 1800s were reading at what would be considered a college level today, or that the kids of today are somehow "stupider" than their 19th-century counterparts. What many fail to consider is that (one) most students used only the simpler McGuffey volumes, which taught only the basics of reading and writing, and (two) school attendance was not compulsory in most states until the late 19th century, so those students who were encouraged to stay in school long enough to get to the advanced volumes were a more academically gifted sample than the general population.

Schools in the 1980s usually did not include computers as a well-integrated part of the curriculum, either as the subjects of study or even as classroom tools. My own elementary school in New Jersey, for example, had a single Commodore PET that was kept in the library on a cart and wheeled into the classrooms whenever the teachers wanted to make use of it, which didn't happen often (this was around 1982, so it probably would have been a 4016 or a 4032). It was more of a curiosity than anything else. I can only remember one or two students besides myself who were even interested in using it, let alone exploring what it could do, so the only kids who got quality time with it—and were subsequently encouraged in that direction by their elders—were the self-motivated ones who were already technologically inclined. Even if there had been a "computer class" for me to attend, I suspect that I would have been bored with it before long because I would have quickly outpaced it. Kids like me could generally feel our way around these computers and figure out how they worked by ourselves, but we were hardly typical cases. The people in this thread who have reported that they found 1980s computers incomprehensible at the time were probably more representative of the average population.

So, it doesn't surprise me that a group of kids allegedly chosen from a random sample wouldn't be able to figure out an Apple ][ today; a random sample of kids from 1982 wouldn't have been able to figure it out either. However, while it is true that a larger percentage of today's kids are familiar with computers compared to the kids of 1982, I would argue that those of us who were into computers in 1982 knew more about them, on average, than today's kids. The home computers of the 1980s were relatively simple and their internals were more accessible, and in order to make use of them, one had to understand something of how they worked. That was part of their appeal to kids like me: computers were complex enough to be intriguing to us, but not so complex that we couldn't understand them, and the more we learned about them, the more we were able to make them do. Having that kind of experience right from the start trains you to think about computer technology "from the inside out", so to speak, but today's kids have been denied that experience thanks to the closed, "appliance-like" computers they grew up with. To them, computers are black boxes that you're only supposed to use in the way the apps say you can, and you're not supposed to ask questions about how or why they work, or how to make them work in the way you want. The whole notion of a personal computer is what's been lost since the 80s.

[Keatah]

Once kids are exposed to the neurosis-inducing clickfests of modern appliance-devices there's probably no going back. And if they do manage to take an interest they're going to be shoehorned into the current infrastructure set by manager types and business climate. They're not going to be trendsetters or likely to produce original works like the programmer dudes at Atari or perhaps Sirius Software for example. They will be working in infrastructure generated by scatterbrains.

 

What's disturbing to me is that once kids are exposed to youtube on smartphones, they find the way of thinking (needed to operate classic computers) too hard.

[jaybird3rd]

What's disturbing to me is that once kids are exposed to youtube on smartphones, they find the way of thinking (needed to operate classic computers) too hard.

I introduced my niece and nephew to classic computers when they were still fairly young, with the idea of giving them the chance to learn the basics of computers in much the same way I did before they moved on to more modern platforms with all their distractions and bad-habit-forming designs. It worked to an extent, but as you say, it's hard to motivate impressionable kids to want to learn about computers and programming once they've been beguiled by wireless tablets with access to YouTube and apps that make fart noises.

 

One might wonder why any of that boring technical stuff should matter today. The popular argument is that, while it may have been necessary back in 1982 to learn about such things as clock cycles, memory allocation, interrupts, RF modulators, and programming in low-level languages like assembly or C (depending on your definition of "low-level"), today's computers are easier to use and don't demand that level of knowledge of their users, so why not "define savviness down" and consider today's tablet-pokers to be just as "expert" in "their computers" as us "80s kids" were in ours? I think Nebulon's anecdote reminds us that those "unimportant" technical details are still very important indeed:

 

After a number of years of seeing students finish the course under the new curriculum, he told me that if he were to know of any mission-critical systems that the new grads has written code for, he would be sure to avoid the systems that they worked on (e.g. high-speed trains, hospitals, etc...). He just didn't trust their ability to come up with something remotely efficient or reliable.

 

Tomorrow's computer scientists, having grown up in the restricted world of tablets and "you don't need to know how this works, so we're not gonna let you tinker with it" computers, will have to work extra hard to overcome their upbringing and to learn the things that a lot of us "80s kids" picked up naturally, right at the beginning of our exploration of computers. I'm beginning to think that this kind of exploration requires an environment which is now almost impossible to recreate for the kids; today's immediate-gratification mobile devices have become too tempting and too numerous.

[Nebulon]

I sure wish they'd bundle a copy of a programming language with every operating system that's sold or included on a new machine.

 

Sort of like how most of the old 8-bit machines were supplied with BASIC.

 

Sure, only some will every use it, but at least it's conveniently accessible for those that are interested in giving it a try.

[Algus]

You know one of the reasons I got more interested in programming was because my first 486 had QBasic with it. I never followed it that far but I know a little bit of BASIC and I've forgotten a semester's worth of C++.

 

That'd actually be a great idea but it's not like when we were kids. Coding simple command line programs is a lot less complicated then building even the most basic Windows app.

 

It was probably easier for people growing up in the 80s and 90s to learn coding as we went since the machines got progressively more complicated as we got older.

[Osgeld]

 

they find the way of thinking (needed to operate classic computers) too hard.

 

wow, blindside a 6 year old with 30 year old technology and they are magically stupid.

 

so how good were you at using vacuum tube computers wait, no thats two new, steam engines when you were that young?

 

amazing, so arragont and ignorant at the same time, the world needs less people who think like you

Edited May 28, 2014 by Osgeld

[RobertLM78]

You know one of the reasons I got more interested in programming was because my first 486 had QBasic with it...

It was QBasic on a 286 for me that helped get me into computing - and why I wound up pulling the old family TI out of storage and start coding on it.

 

 

 

wow, blindside a 6 year old with 30 year old technology and they are magically stupid.

 

so how good were you at using vacuum tube computers wait, no thats two new, steam engines when you were that young?

 

amazing, so arragont and ignorant at the same time, the world needs less people who think like you

I think you missed Keatah's point. What he's saying is that classic microcomputers still required users to know a bit about how their computers worked, particularly if one wanted to do anything more advanced than BASIC. Nowadays, all one needs to do is push a button, wait a minute, then fire up whatever program/s that are going to be needed from a GUI environment with icons, and commonly, no command line (at least not by default).

[Osgeld]

Keatah's point is to shake his fist and yell about how stupid anyone younger than him is, or rant, see any of his posts for reference

 

I personally fail to see much difference tween tapping an icon and running a program, or inserting a floppy disk and turning the computer on, which is how millions of people used their computers

Edited May 28, 2014 by Osgeld

[jaybird3rd]

I personally fail to see much difference tween tapping an icon and running a program, or inserting a floppy disk and turning the computer on, which is how millions of people used their computers

Well, if that's the only activity you're considering, then no, there's no difference in principle, since all you're doing in both cases is loading a program into memory and running it. But if you look at the whole machine, including the range of things you can do with it and the level of access to the internals that you have, tablets are totally different machines—and, from an educational standpoint, much less interesting—than home computers like the Apple ][.

[Keatah]

Back in the old days, more users had a concept of CPU RAM ROM DOS I/O and FILES. Users had more of an intuitive feel of how all that fit together. If not on a technical byte and transistor level, a conceptual level. The thought process required to understand it all is missing from today's smartphone users. And they don't seem to want to learn it.

 

I remember shakin' in ma'boots when I first upgraded a 48K Apple II to 64K. I had to pull out a part from the mainboard and insert an intimidating 16 pin DIP/ribbon cable plug into the socket. Could I line all the pins up right? Could I avoid static from invading the machine? I had to insert a card into a slot and not disturb anything else. Did I follow the instructions right? This was a $2000 rig I had and there would be no replacing it if I blew it up! Absolutely not! This was REAL!

 

After successfully doing that I must have booted the DOS 3.3 System Master (to load Integer Basic into high memory) 20 times to celebrate and really prove I had done it!

 

I quickly gained confidence with other expansion cards, and soon I was throwing them around like VCS Game Programs. I only had more trepidation with adjusting the speed of the Disk II even though it was reversible, and I had some misplaced fear about loading DOS and configuring partitions on the Sider 10MB HDD. But after thinking about those two items, and reading the instructions and thinking about them, I found most mistakes would be reversible. And thus the fear evaporated.

 

And all that applies to today's hardware and setups and all. The fearlessness that is.

[jaybird3rd]

And all that applies to today's hardware and setups and all. The fearlessness that is.

Yes, because you had the experience of exploring the guts of those older machines, and that informs the way you approach and think about modern computers because you know from firsthand experience that they are really no different. The electronics are smaller and more integrated now, the CPUs are faster, and there's more memory and storage, but it's still the same classes of components, interrelating in the same way, serving the same roles to make a complete system.

 

Those who grew up with tablets and even laptops never had the same experiences, and so their concept of computers is circumscribed by what the apps allow them to do, because that's all they ever see. As far as they're concerned, what the computer can do and what the apps can do is the same thing, and if there isn't "an app for that", then the computer can't do it. Their approach to computers isn't nearly as fearless: they don't know what's going on inside the box, and they're afraid to push the system to work differently for fear of "breaking" it, even if it would serve their needs better if it worked differently. That's more of a fear-based approach, and that's not the way I think young people should be brought up to think about computers. I try to emphasize to my students that they, the users, are the ones who are in charge over the computers, not the other way around, and I try to give them the tools they need to take charge and to approach computers without the intimidation they may have felt before taking my classes.

[desiv]

I had to actually read the "Apple II Reference Manual" and other included documentation when I was a kid;

It's funny how we say that nowadays as tho it's a bad thing..

(I realize you were proud of it; I mean in general)

 

People seem to think that having to read documentation means that the software wasn't complete / good enough.

 

While there's some truth to that, a well written manual can be incredibly additive to a learning/fun experience.

I think too many poorly written manuals killed that tho...

 

desiv