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A Tricycle of the Mind

s Christmas, my daughter and I are building a computer together. The sheer power of what will be her first computer, compared to the computers I used when I was her age is staggering, as is the capability of the software she’ll have access to.

Of course, there are a dozens of modules you can install that let you draw basic shapes, play sounds, etc., but, then, that’s kind of the point: the complexity and lack of approachability of modern machines makes them a lot less discoverable than the 8 bit micros of the past. As silly as drawing lines and telling the speaker to beep at a certain frequency is, it is what kept us interested long enough to develop a lifelong passion for computing. I certainly spent a lot of time playing games, and, later, when I managed to install Linux on my computer, I spent a lot of time aimlessly exploring the system, reading man pages (I’d start on one, then decide to read something from the related section that seemed interesting, then something from that man page’s related section, and so on until sometimes I forgot what I was originally looking for.)

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