Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 21st Jun 2012 22:40 UTC
John Goerzen, Debian/GNU Linux developer, transitions his kids from bash to xmonad: "I'd been debating how to introduce GUIs for a very long time. It has not escaped my attention that children that used Commodores or TRS-80s or DOS knew a lot more about how their computers worked, on average, than those of the same age that use Windows or MacOS. I didn't want our boys to skip an entire phase of learning how their technology works." I decided long ago that my kids - if I ever have them, I'm undecided and way too young - will learn computing the way I learned it: with a CLI. I never realised an xmonad setup would form a good transition phase into GUIs.
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RE[2]: Rear view mirror.
by westlake on Sat 23rd Jun 2012 00:44
in reply to "RE: Rear view mirror. "
Member since:2010-01-07
No no it's not a valid count... Win 95 sales went straight to workers in offices, and the other 8 bit systems had good chances to land in houses with childrens.
No.
No more than the enterprise and small business instantly migrated from MSDOS to Win 3.1 or from XP to Vista and Win 7.
Windows 95 made an explosive entry into the consumer market.
I can still vividly recall launching the "Good Times" video from the companion CD:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc
In October 1996 AOL went to flat-rate monthly billing and our phone service (like others) to an affordable flat-rate calling plan.
I had struggled with E-mail. FTP. Telnet. BBS. IRC chat. USENET.
AOL was a revelation. Layer upon layer of complexity simply stripped away.
Nothing would ever be the same again.
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Member since:
2011-04-27
No no it's not a valid count... Win 95 sales went straight to workers in offices, and the other 8 bit systems had good chances to land in houses with childrens.
Btw, I have two childrens 8 and 4 years and for my fun I helped this year teachers of the local primary school in teaching the so called "information tecnology".
So I can tell you some real truth:
1) adults without kids , when speaking of kids, are very funny...
2) ALL children of 6 in 2012 have seen a lot of GUIs, in TV sets, in consoles, in phones etc, and you can not deny you live in a world of (advanced?) GUIs to children, they aren't so stupid.
3) when back in the days I launched games with 'load "*",8,1' GUI was not so common, and I have really no alternatives.
4) I like me too the idea of initialize a geek kid now with a command line but I have realized is out of time, we in the eighties started with the edge of home computer tecnology, and our kids must start with today edge of tecnology; try to think of your dad in 1982 asking you to make a punch card !!!!!