Because, you know, we were actually quite impressive for putting up with this stuff 30 years ago.






The Jedi Master

No thank you. Every time I watch one of those videos I get extremely pissed off and depressed as to how mankind will go backwards rather than forwards with these kids.

I know it's probably false, but still makes me not wanna live in this world.

I watched that yesterday,the kids were quite funny.

I'm not sure how that video indicates anything about mankind going backwards with kids. Someone dumped kids in front of something un-intuitive that they've never used before and hasn't been used by the masses in 20 years or so. I wouldn't expect them to know how to use it. I would hope that no one is out there wasting time and money teaching kids how to use 30 year old computers.

If I gave you a horse and saddle and said "go to the store to get some milk" and you weren't able to do it, would you say that's because you've "gone backwards" relative to those who lived 120 years ago?

I think they should do one of these with twenty-five year olds being introduced to carbon paper, mimeograph machines, and unwound mechanical watches.

When we were closing down our building a few years ago our young Captain was perplexed and amazed at all three. He was baffled by the idea of stencils, blue goo, and cranking a handle to make copies of something, though he did know what carbon paper was for (he had just never actually seen any).

Winding my watch to charge the battery back up was really high tech until I broke down and told the truth that it's just a spring and that my watch had to be wound every day.

I am already amazed at how badly dated some of my games from the mid 2000's look. And i don't think i will ever own a calculator watch again

Like this -- ?







lol -- I found this old watch in my drawer yesterday,,, when I saw your post I had to take the pic. Yick I haven't had a watch on in 30 years -- get it off me!

WC

Hey I had a watch like that 20 years ago. And had a Apple 2 clone by Franklin computers back in 83.
As a matter of fact, still have the old Franklin collecting dust in my storage unit. Went to fire it
up up last year and and it gave up the ghost. Think the PSU for the this old thing died.

Naw, blow the dust off of it and give it some healthy whacks - it'll probably come back to life as the dust and junk from just sitting there is knocked around a bit.

No, the electrolytics are probably dried out. The ultimate
fate of pretty much all electronics, I don't think even
current ones have solved the problem, though I expect that
some which are well sealed (premium price?) last longer than
others. There was a period in the 90s where the market was
flooded with irresistibly cheap ones that seemed ok and worked
fine for about five years before starting to die in droves,
made for lots of work for repair folk, except that unless
it was a low volume specialty item for an industrial application,
it was cheaper to just replace whatever the hardware was with the
new current equivalent. Was it here that someone told the story
of the former girlfriend of an electronics repair guy, who
could prescribe the repair of any piece of electronic equipment
with 95% accuracy without even inspecting it, based on what
she'd gleaned from watching and listening to her boyfriend for
years? She'd just say "I know what's wrong: replace the capacitors".
And she'd be right.

this is the reason why I have greater respect for experience when compared to intelligence.

Wow, Casio as well..been a long time since i saw one. Don't lose it, that thing could be worth twenty bucks one day

Having a Casio calculator watch was a rite of passage towards being a true nerd in the 80's.

Bloody hell Dart, how old are you?! lol

I have a slightly newer version of that watch (it has the light button on the lower right front) that I just bought a replacement for 2 weeks ago.

That one is still my alarm clock. Bought a new battery a month ago.




The Jedi Master

I had a CASIO Watch calculator in the 80's.

The other kids in Middle and High School thought I was so cool!

My math teachers would make me sit in the front row when it was test and quiz times because they thought I would cheat.

That didn't make sense on their part because the watch calculator was only capable of doing basic addition, subtraction, division and multiplication.

All kids back in those days knew how to perform all 4 basic math with just a pencil and a sheet of paper, unlike the ignorant kids nowadays.

Trust me, you can pick out 10 kids at random who are in college and they can't do an ioda of multiplication and division and even subtraction without the aid of an electronic device.

In those days, no calculators were allowed in Math class until my Junior and Senior years in High School when I took Trigonometry, Elementary Analysis and Calculus.

Now back to the topic on hand, I still have my 1984 Apple McIntosh and my Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 with a whopping maximum 64k of total RAM and they both still work.

I was semi-kidding of course. I don't expect them to know how to use a 30 years old computer. I understand those are very young kids, too. But the comments they make, they made me feel like they have 0 capability of "digging" things. At their age I was disasembling things to try (and failing, of course) to understand how they worked, not complaining that "this can't be used".

When I was in 6th grade, I took apart the light switch at our apartment in Italy.

I caused the entire 5 story building to go dark.

He said humanity's inginuity is great, but he's forgetting it was all powered with the free market. The free market makes everyone richer, even the poor. The poorest person can by a smart phone with more use than the most expensive computer 25 years ago.

I've got an Apple ][e in my basement that I pull out every now and again to play with. It still works fine. Even most of the floppies still seem to have a decent hold on their data (which is pretty surprising). Probably the coolest part is all the 'AIDS Computer' stickers on it (the store it came from in SF). Presumably they've since changed their name.

I like it (and I was born in 81, for reference... though we were still using Apple ][e's in high school. Since it's all DIP chips (mostly 7400's) and the PCB was etched from a hand-drawn mask, it's easy to see how it fits together--probably would be a good educational piece for an aspiring EE or CE. It's unfortunate that they're pretty well forced to use surface mount components these days which are a massive pain to hand solder even with lots of practice. Of course, at the same time, you can get a custom 4-layer PCB fabricated for around $20 or $30 if you don't mind waiting a few weeks for delivery and there's lots of free, easy to use CAD packages to lay it out with. I'm sure that wasn't the case back then.

Things like Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, Beagleboards and such are great learning tools, but I'm not sure there is quite the same satisfaction and sense of accomplishment that comes from reading the data sheets and putting together an actual piece of hardware from scratch that works (taking into account that no individual is likely to own an IC fab).

I think maybe they just picked the wrong kids for the video. If you took a budding computer nerd, popped open the case, and gave him a tour of the innards, I'm sure he or she would be quite enraptured. I would have been.

Also, I'm confident that I could get mine hooked up to the internet with just a bit of extra hardware and a solid weekends work. Probably just telnet, to be fair, but from there it's not all that big a leap to a Lynx like browser. Besides, mine has the 128K memory upgrade, which is a huge amount compared to most of the modern MCUs I'm used to working with.