Micah's bloggy widget ([info]scanwidget) wrote,
@ 2008-08-23 11:21:00
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The future of computer education
I just stumbled upon a web site which still sells the Elenco Micro-Master MM-8000 Computer Training Kit, a state-of-the-art piece of educational hardware which includes an 8085 processor, 256 bytes of RAM, and a convenient set of keyswitches and LEDs for entering programs and inspecting memory. I remember seeing these in magazines like Electronics Now in the early 1990s, and they sure haven't changed.

Here's an excerpt from the manual where they describe how to load your first program:




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(Anonymous)
2008-08-24 01:08 am UTC (link)
Fantastic.

My dad tells me war stories about when and a few buddies used to mess around with an Altair. They had the bringup sequence all figured out. First they blindly keyswitched in a basic loop to read the serial keyboard. Once that was in they started the machine running and started typing in the next phase of the loop - echoing back to the printer, so they could see if they'd made typos. The next phase was keying in code for backspace. Eventually they'd bootstrapped their way up to the BASIC interpreter. Us kids these days with our BIOS and our Forth interpreters in Open Firmware don't know how good we have it ;)

-joe

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