Tales of collecting 6

Loved the link to the Lego logic gates - takes me back to my first year at college, building an ALU out of 74-series logic. Happy days. I'm 40 next year and have a couple of kids of my own, go I guess that makes me "mature". My wife wouldn't agree though :-)

The course I studied in the early-mid 80's was half hardware, half software. We spent much of the first year learning about De Morgans Laws, Karnaugh Maps, logic gates, flip-flops, the works. The practical work was excellent fun - I can't remember the name of the kit we used now, however. It was a box with IC sockets and pins to slot connector wires onto, several LEDs -- single diodes as well as an 8-segment calculator-type display, but you had to build the display circuitry yourself!

I've been paid to program since 1987, cutting my teeth on the 8051 microcontroller, then the 68HC11, and since then various high-level languages. It seems to me that most of the fun's gone out of software development these days. Software development these days equates to attempting to dominate the industry with half-baked bug-ridden APIs, brain-numbing design patterns, and dumbed-down IDEs. Many people coming out of college, at least in the UK where I live, now seem to depend on IDEs to generate the code for them, and have little understanding of the underlying concepts. Worse still, they come out primed to sit in the Sun or Microsoft camp and display the sort of religious zealotry usually only found in jaded old hackers like myself :-) This can't be good for the industry in the long term, can it?

I worry about the computer education my kids get at school too. There the emphasis is on PC/Windows - anything else "isn't useful". Luckily I have a study full of old workstations and home micros. Hopefully if either of the kids gets really interested in computers they'll get hooked on a Unix flavour, VMS or MacOS :-)

- Alan