Same here. I plan to restore my old 386 for my daughter as her first computer.
I used my old 128k/512k Mac to teach typing and foster artistic skills with MacWrite and MacPaint and an old 386 pc, probably an Epson if I remember right, to set them up with age-appropriate skills games.
There is no substitute though for hands-on learning using manipulatives like puzzles, building blocks, etc. These teach different skills that are critical to gaining an understanding of how things work and in learning to visualize unseen parts of mechanical devices and mechanisms. Understanding physics is aided by assembling various parts large and small, heavy and light together and trying to build a working contraption that doesn't fling parts everywhere when you try to roll it across the floor. Balance and the effects of asymmetry are easier taught with real objects than with computer displays.
> I have increasingly wanted to make sure they have access to older educational content that is not dependent on the will of a publisher and does not constantly connect them with possible cyber-bullying.
My life experience leads me to reject some of the premises of this effort, the path to hell is paved by well meaning people trying to control children’s access to information. My parents did everything in their power to ensure I only consumed content that aligned with fundamentalist religion, young earth creationism, and hyper conservative politics. I wasn’t allowed to learn about dinosaurs because content about them made reference to their existing millions of years ago, not inside the “<6000 years age of the earth”. I wasn’t allowed to read science materials that discussed or even tangentially referenced evolution. I didn’t really know what a gay person was until I was an adult. I wasn’t allowed to watch most popular cartoons and movies because they depicted sex, violence, and other sin. They enforced the ridiculous concept of “bad words”. I am thankful every day that occasional unsupervised Internet access allowed me to broaden my perspective. I’m grateful for being exposed to violence and porn and racism and discussion about suicide and every controversial thing that exists because these are things that exist in the world that I should be aware of and understand. I now believe in talking to children about challenging subjects, not preventing them from being exposed to them. My experience made me much more zealous about freedom of information and speech than most.
Cyber bullying is a weak excuse for limiting Internet freedom. I was psychologically tortured in person every day by other kids, made an outcast, and shunned. I was hit/kicked/punched/tackled or threatened with a weapon almost every day for years. I developed something akin to PTSD from constantly watching my back for kids trying to surprise attack me from behind. Internet interactions are incredibly safe environments for learning how to cope with bullies by comparison, like training wheels for dealing with real world bullying you will encounter. Unless you’re associated with something that goes mega viral like Monica Lewinsky or the Star Wars kid making you forever tied to an embarrassment, online bullying will never have even 5% of the impact of what you’ll have done to you in person. We need to worry about the far more damaging things that are done in person with full awareness of teachers/administrators who are sometimes even complicit. Kids can’t even feel physically safe in schools and we’re responding by limiting their access to the Internet. Even more access to the Internet might have allowed me to realize that I wasn’t alone in my experience, it’s almost universally experienced by ADHD and autistic kids, and it gets much better when you get past school.
At what age should we wait to allow kids to read about suicide methods?
I am not hiding my children from the world, but I am also not letting a toddler or a kindergartner cook on a stove or metaphorically speaking "putting a loaded weapon in their hands" too soon. There is plenty of real world stuff they do not need to be concerned with at this time.
There will be a time when they are mature enough to deal with the adult world, but now is not that time.
Just seeing drugs/alcohol/sex in media increases the likelihood of trying them by 25-50%, further increasing with number of exposures.
It’s nice to have ideals that information should be free, even better to fight off abuse (what your parents did to you), but that does not make it the right direction to go in.
This coming from a child psychiatrist’s mouth.
You want your kids to stay away from drugs? Don’t even show it to them until their brains are formed. Don’t even acknowledge they exist. You’ll breed curiosity, and they’ll be statistically more likely to say yes when offered.
School choice: How we get taxpayers to pay for your kid's private and/or religious education
I'm okay with 1 if you admit that you can't teach your kids every subject, and get help where you can, but 2 is unacceptable.
Please do not read too much into this as me trying to control our kids beyond normal parenting and making sure they learn to grow up to be strong, confident, and caring for others. They do have age appropriate access to the Internet and an iPad with modern educational games on it as well.
There is disagreement among bible believing Christians about Genesis. I remember clearly reading it for myself as a child and realizing that the day counting did not start until the third verse. It starts out saying in God created the universe and everything in it in verse 1 without reference to a time frame. It's worth looking up Hugh Ross videos as he presents on this stuff in a way very different from the young earth creationists. There is a Northern Irish professor by the name of John Lennox who gives a very good lecture too. I presume that many here are well versed with many of the high quality secular professors, so I specifically wanted to point out two who are coming from a Christian point of view. Not everyone fully subscribes to Bishop's dating methods.
I too was very exposed to that idea but I was not restricted from reading science or anything I wanted.
1. Everybody who was there actively wanted to be there. You could easily live your life without Internet access and most people did. This also meant you could take a break and disconnect without feeling like you were seriously missing out.
2. Web design hadn't been relentlessly optimized for extracting money from you. There was no A/B testing or engagement metrics. Commercial web sites existed but they weren't designed by expert psychological manipulators like modern ones. Amateur web sites were purely amateur in the original sense (something done for the love of it) with no possibility of monetization corrupting this positive attitude.
I don't see any chance of returning to that state of affairs.
It's lazy but I set my 2yo up with a thinkpad running ubuntu that boots directly into terminal and has a bunch of single-letter aliases to open a few very specific sites including a sketchy in-browser dos emulation running math blaster.
Would have loved to actually just get a dos machine running for him but time starts moving so fast after they're born...
Anyway he's 5 now and still loves getting into some Math Blaster, and it's still providing plenty of challenge for him, I forgot how far it went academically.
Interestingly I think this giving kids this kind of retro software has the positive side-effect of boring kids after a reasonable amount of time. I've been thinking of it as finite media.
He loves Math Blaster but will often choose a physical math workbook instead when its math time, and he stops playing after an hour or so at most so I can just give him unrestricted access to his thinkpad and he organically self-regulates screen-time. Noticed similar effects giving him my old gameboy pocket and an old 8 inch CRT with a built in DVD player and a stack of random Reading Rainbow DVDs. Also using a ThinkPad or Raspberry Pi that struggles at least a little bit with streaming YouTube has helped keep that from getting out of control since I couldn't ultimately avoid youtube for some no-dvd-available science / math / music video stuff.
I highly recommend Eureka, Dirk Niblick, udiprod and Minds Eye.
Give it a basic postscript printer driver and a microSD slot for future expansion, a gopher client and a mud client, maybe access to a couple other legacy protocols but no standard web access so it won’t work as a media consumption device or social media outside of things like (AI?) moderated MUDs or chatrooms. You’d want a python or JavaScript interpreter and a simple file manager. Also perhaps an interface to Wikipedia and a telnet type interface to a chatbot API for local or commercial models.
It runs a little against my grain, but perhaps to enable the network Stuff It would need a PPPOE connection to a gateway so that users could be registered and controlled to remove bad actors : tied to chip ID for a “secured area” that parents could opt in to ? iDK, online safety is a tough problem for children. Maybe there is a better solution than total AI surveillance and access controls, but how would you keep bad actors out? Or maybe just not offer any online functionality at all, except maybe a Bluetooth proximity based link to other machines to enable LAN parties?
Something like that would make a pretty great kids computer that could give them access to a complete k-6 education and much deeper computer skills than the current host of consumption oriented devices.
It does seem like emulation is the way.
I learn with DOS an such under Elementary. So, kids today can do the same.
No, no Subleq, but:
- 32MB disk
- 256-1MB RAM
- 64x16 screen
- Forth block interface and prompt
- Printing? Basic PostScript can be set fast from Forth.
No internet, just Forth. The basic of loops, and even basic 'algebra' with the 'fruit balancing puzzle'.
Games? Sokoban under Forth, with a few blocks wasted with code and levels. It would fit under 110KB. 'Adventure' (Collosal Cave) fits under 150KB. Tetris, the same.
Gopher? Ok, doable, even a basic Gopher client too; I'm doing one with JimTCL, and in Forth with a proper stack I'd set one menu based such as:
1 item
2 bar bla bla
3 baz
If you can code a Gopher client, a MUD one it's almost at ease.
To be clear this isn't about hiding information from kids. It is about providing places for their curiosity that is age appropriate and of a high quality. What I think all caretakers seek to avoid are books that are of low quality or age inappropriate (e.g. AI generated, scenes of suicide, etc), video that are developed in the style of the Cocomelon "distract-a-tron"[1], or software that encourages gacha gaming and/or uncontrolled open chat/video/etc.
What are ways care takers can practically and easily curate today?
Examples
- YouTube Kids
- Jellyfin, Kavita, or Calibre for ebooks
- Open WebUI with a custom system prompt for kids
Counter Examples
- Netflix, Disney, Amazon, etc: difficult to non-existent curation controls - all or nothing
- Kindle Kids: there are controls but for Library books the process is 12+ clicks between the Libby and Kindle app: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/can-you-share-kindl...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/arts/television/cocomelon...
I searched for modern alternatives and settled on a mix of the Endless series of games on iPad(Endless Learning Academy bundles them all), and as they got older, GCompris. They can get lost for hours in GCompris exploring the different games and activities.
But I was already too late. Kid's WAY into Minecraft, and consumes all sorts of videos from my sister's iPad in terms of how to build things with it.
He's a teenager now, and I'm having some discussions with my sister about when is a good time to expose him to Doom (1993). Fragging cacodemons is a rite of passage any teen must undergo.
This is less about retro software, and maybe more about classic software, or software that did something well with constraints of hardware and software, something a learner often has to do as well.
rietta•2d ago