I look forward to the Python videos. I have some experience with it, but it’s limited, so I should learn it because it’s used so much these days.
I totally hear you on the “forced code formatting requirement”. I’m sure you, like me, have heard feedback from many new programmers (especially those with some experience with BASIC) to the effect that Pascal, or Cobol, or some other languages are awful because they force you into structured coding. It takes a while for them to realize that structured programming is actually liberating because it frees you from having to constantly worry about the spelling of variable names, missing or incorrect punctuation, etc. Debugging unstructured languages is, or can be, a nightmare I do not want to revisit.
The idea of getting back to using a “tokenized” language after all these years has a certain fascination. No doubt, at some point, I will be loading a tokenized… er, excuse my old terminology… I mean a byte-coded program into a hex editor and having a look at what it’s doing to the English commands. Of course, these days there’s no doubt a dictionary online that I could just look up and read all the translations… er, compilations.
Speaking of custom devices, watching Paul McWhorter’s series on Arduino gave me the idea that I might, finally, be able to fulfill a minor dream: to build an NTP-based WiFi projection clock for my bedroom, one that can:
project the time on the wall;
have variable brightness;
automatically sychronize itself to Internet time;
take care of daylight savings time;
maybe even figure out the time zone its currently in.
My first computer was a Busch 2090 four bit computer with wooping 576 bytes of system memory.
In total you were limited to 256 assembler commands and your system memory was full The output device was a 6 digit 7 segment calculator display. Mine was a tube like on the wiki page below. Later versions had 7 segment LED blocks.
It was part of an electronics kit and had 4 input connectors and 4 output connectors.
Just WOW!!!
My first computer was a AMSTRAD 6128 the first one with a cassette data player. After that, many pc’s. Right now i use ASUS and LENOVO Laptops and desktops. I used to use a Macbook pro for a while ( three years ), but i gave it away because i couldn’t find any CAD/CAM system to work in it! Now MacNeel release Rhino3D for Mac with limited functionality related to Win vers.
I remember loading programs into my TRS-80 Model 1 (and the Model III until I bought two 5 1/4" floppy drives) from a cassette player. Not a reliable way to save or load programs. I also remember typing in programs printed out in 80 Microcomputing magazine. They innevitably had errors in them, which made it necessary to troubleshoot. Then they came out with a weird block coding system that, if you bought the reader, could do all the typing for you, and quickly. Honestly, looking back, it was the predecessor of today’s QR code systems.
