Maybe we can all become coolly creative?
I was just reading headlines and this one caught me: Free Tool Offers ‘easy’ Coding. Having struggled with some codes lately, I read the article.
For kids? Why should kids have all this fun? Why shouldn’t some code-deprived adults gradually learn something about coding by playing with this program?
My experience post-DOS with code was expressed beautifully in the quote, “”A program doesn’t congratulate you for the 90% that you got right. It fails for the 10% you got wrong.”
I was one of the early small businesses to computerize. It was before PCs and my computer had no hard drive, but instead two 5.25″ floppies. One had the program, the other held the information. If you ever wondered why those little hard 3.5″ floppies that did not flop were called floppies, it’s because the larger predecessor was limp as a cellophane sack. If you happened to hold it near something with an electrical charge it was ruined. Huge areas of information were stripped off the surface by the weak charge of, say an amber necklace or a staticky sweater.
Programs weren’t things you bought at a shop, you wrote them. Databases you created yourself using Dbase or another system. I knew what I was doing back then. The original Windows, which I resisted until my employees rebelled, wasn’t too terrible, but every step since then control of your computing experience has marched away from you and toward experts. And they know code.
What, you must want to know, did that computer with no hard drive at all cost back in the Seventies? $15,000.00 and it included a trainer to teach you how to turn it on and store those floppies.
2 comments May 15th, 2007
