asciilifeform: phunphakt : in american schools, there are power tools. but children are not permitted near them. they may only draw a cut, and beg teacher to make it.
asciilifeform: i actually wish , in retrospect, that i'd had an extra year of saw, hammer, before comp.
asciilifeform: you'd think not much. but can even more readily learn 'reality has a shape and a resistance-of-medium objectively' than with comp.
asciilifeform: re tools, asciilifeform was given saws, nails, hammers, then wires, diodes, etc long before comp
asciilifeform: it was asciilifeform's first close-up playing with 'random'
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-12-13#1751018 << they all did this, because 'randomized' memory on boot ( no addr lines were wasted making video switchable on/off , so you could see the rubbish when power came up )☝︎
asciilifeform: but to know what makes the program -- oughta.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: nobody said kid oughta know how to smelt the sand, gassify fluorine, etch chipz.
asciilifeform: it is to this day my belief that a comp that dun fit-in-kid-head is broken by design.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: one of asciilifeform's persistent crackpotteries, is to reforge this sword. i.e. make comp that fits in kid head .
asciilifeform: ( i.e. rom got deselected after being copied to ram , so did not sit and uselessly hog addr space )
asciilifeform: tiny, seemingly, change, but made for whole new kind of micro
asciilifeform: the reason this was doable, was that mos6510 -- unlike ye olde 6502 -- had an extra register, that gave you 6 flippable bits , nonmemorymapped; and you could bank-switch with it
asciilifeform: ( which you could not, if it lived in rom )
asciilifeform: you could actually use all 64kB if you overwrote the basic
asciilifeform: commodore did the copy-to-ram thing to win the owner a 'cheat' of usable address space
asciilifeform: ( and iirc classical crapples executed the rombasic directly from rom, so 0 boot )
asciilifeform: as, e.g., commodore, bk, apple1/2, sinclair, mircea_popescutron, etc. did.
asciilifeform: to revisit the micros : it is interesting that NOBODY today makes a comp of any description that presents the eye with a programmable prompt immediately on power up.☟︎
asciilifeform: the commodore had -- luxury!! -- the 5inch disk drive.
asciilifeform: funnily enough i did not program the 'iskra', was small, programmed already 'commodore' ( and inherited a 8086 a few yrs after )
asciilifeform: ( for e.g. bk0010, you needed specifically one ~without~ equalizer thing )
asciilifeform: not everybody had the proper tape deck
asciilifeform: and much of the 'formative' aspect was precisely the romtronic prompt
asciilifeform: thing is, 80s micros had the rom basic. so cassette was really optional, could enter simple gamez from paper, if wholly starved for 'sneakernet'
asciilifeform: and i still dunget it. dafuq, box that forces you to BUY gamez!
asciilifeform: e.g. msdos megagame 'star control 2' used this type of audio
asciilifeform: you could know that a proggy used this method if you tried to run it on a comp with piezo beeper: would sound like rubbish
asciilifeform: and was played using clever method , where normally '1-bit' pc speaker membrane was allowed to travel 'partial' way , squeezing extra 'bitness'☟︎
asciilifeform: i ended up, briefly , in a 15 . gotta wonder where the 15 came from , possibly it is 'tallest that folx can endure regularly walking up to with groceries , given that lift ~never works'
asciilifeform: ( is there a straight ro equiv word ..? )
