The most important anecdote that I can tell from the early 1980s is how optimistic we all were. My dad was an engineer and helped take the lead on fundraising to buy Apple ][+ computers for the school classrooms in our town. He used to earnestly tell everyone that he met that my generation would be the last one to go through a curriculum where programming was not a core skill. He imagined a world where everyone would understand how to code.
He passed away before the realization set in that "computer skills" were going to be defined as word processing and spreadsheets rather than programming, and I think he would be very disappointed in our current trajectory.
That optimism still largely existed in the 90s, too, when grade school math textbooks had BASIC listings in them. Pretty sure that all disappeared by the time I graduated at the end of that decade, except in districts that couldn't afford new textbooks.
I don’t think it will ever happen unfortunately. Programming requires the ability to think abstractly. Something that most people are not very good at. It’s the same reason why most people will never become good at math. IQ tests basically tests your ability to think abstractly. And the more a job requires abstract thinking, the higher the average IQ is for people working those jobs. No amount of money or intensive focused training will change that.
My memory is that MS laughed because they did not believe the hype. The laughing stopped when they got the first iPhones in house and were able to see how much space Apple was able to dedicate to the battery.
I had a similar path to nano. Pico was the default editor for the Pine email client, and I still use Alpine for work decades later. I am generally an emacs user, but nano / pico definitely feel familiar and comfortable.
I was in Central Africa (CAR and Chad) in the early 90s and shortwave was a lifeline. The BBC was on in the background almost all day, with the exception of switching to the VOA once in a while to check on sports scores. Beyond news, shortwave was how things like evacuation and security reports were shared.
My shortwave broke in transit home, but I picked up a new one around 2000, just in time for the BBC to end its broadcasts to North America. That really signaled the beginning of the end as other broadcasters cut back or eliminated their broadcasts.
I can't believe WRJ came up on HN. But, where are you seeing that? WRJ only has one zip code (that I know of), 05001.
WRJ (population between 2,000-3,000) is not only smaller than Cleveland, it is not actually a town. WRJ is a village of the town of Hartford, VT and probably would not be known at all without the railroad station.
Found it: WRJ mail sorting plant is a "sectional center facility" for a lot of NH and VT.
A destination sectional center facility (SCF) is a processing and distribution center (P&DC) of the United States Postal Service (USPS) that serves a designated geographical area defined by one or more three-digit ZIP Code prefixes. A sectional center facility routes mail between local post offices and to and from network distribution centers (NDCs) and Surface Transfer Centers (STCs), which form the backbone of the network.
It's listed on the dropdown for 035, 036, 037, 050, 051, 052, 053, 054, 057, 058, and 059. Being relatively new to the area, I haven't the faintest idea where any of those (besides 050) are. Thanks for shedding some light on yet another interesting aspect of our postal system.
If you're in WRJ, hello neighbor! And if you're not, but are nearby, happy mud season :-)
French instruction starts very early in our town in Vermont because there are over 8 million French speakers right next to us, including almost 2 million living right over the border in Montréal. The ability to communicate in French has been incredibly useful over the course of my career, not just in North America, but across Europe and Africa. There are 29 countries that speak French as an official language and about 274 million fluent speakers.
Yes, if you read the first Dartmouth BASIC documentation you immediately understand that Kurtz and Kemeny were designing a language that students could teach themselves, with the goal of them being able to transition to Fortran.
Amusingly, my physics and math classes all used FORTRAN, but my teachers were OK with me translating the programs to BASIC so I could run them on my crude MS-DOS computer. I had a copy of the IBM FORTRAN compiler, but it was this cumbersome beast that required two diskettes -- one contained the compiler and the other contained the linker, or something like that. And the complete compile/link workflow took several minutes. BASIC, and then Turbo Pascal, were game changing because you could run a program instantly.
BASIC even had crude array math via the MAT statement though I don't recall the details.
I got to my senior year, second semester, and had a meeting with my advisor to make sure I had met all of my graduation requirements. He looked at my record and said: "Hey, you were supposed to take a programming class. But you know how to program, don't you?" I said yes. He checked the box to waive that requirement for me. Then I started breathing again.
I had an SE/30! It was a big upgrade from my Mac Plus, even with the external floppy drive, because I could finally compile Pascal code without having to swap discs. All of this was a HUGE upgrade from my //e with only one drive where I had to swap floppies for Apple Pascal constantly.
The SE/30 was a seriously useful computer and a ridiculously fun machine to use every day.
I had a Mac Plus and found a card that would clip-on to the 68000 and takeover the system at boot time. It had a fast 68020 and 68882 math coprocessor on it. It also came with a fan to get the extra heat out of the box. Ran great. Good times.
This is probably a "me problem," but I have had a hard time moving beyond the tutorials to actually getting work done. For example, I am working on a project right now where I would typically use a dict of dicts in python and then use map functions so that I can process the keys in parallel. When coming to python from perl, ruby, and c++ I found that I already had a pretty good intuition about how this would work.
I read the documentation, but could not make as much sense of it as I should. I searched online for example and found a few hits on the question, but not nearly as many as I would in other languages, and if there were answers then they were often marked "wrong," or I could not get them to work with my code.
After a lot of searching and trial and error I finally got that working, then started looking into how to run this on multiple nodes and processors and got completely lost.
I am sure the documentation is there and that I could do a better job figuring it out. I am also sure Julia would be a great match for the type of work that I do, and I am going to keep trying. But from what I have seen so far it feels like the pain of trying to migrate from Python to Julia is pretty difficult to justify.
This is definitely not just a you problem. There are resources out there like [1] and [2], but much less in the way of curation and a dearth of end-to-end tutorials/walkthroughs.
I'm not sure how best to improve the situation, but the current state of things leaves much to be desired. If you're willing, don't hesitate to post about your experience and any feedback you have on the community forums.
He passed away before the realization set in that "computer skills" were going to be defined as word processing and spreadsheets rather than programming, and I think he would be very disappointed in our current trajectory.