I remember the magic well, myself – I originally learned in BASIC, on a VIC-20 with 4K of RAM – but I remember how cool it was to poke a value into a register, get out the logic probe, and see that a line on the back of the machine had gone from low to high.

While I admire enormously what you and Ryan are doing, I also wish you guys had some iron lying around so old that a regular old analog scope or logic probe would be fast enough for the kids to see the messages propagate down the bus – something so simple that the more advanced of them could honestly hope to dump its BASIC interpreter and understand the resulting bytecode. I know there’s no place in the world for the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 any more – but I feel like they were much more friendly learning machines than our current systems, which require surface mount soldering skills to modify, very expensive test equipment to trace the activities on the busses of, and a fair amount of hand waving to understand some of the intricate details. For example,. how does one explain wake on LAN? DMA? the 7 layer OSI model? You and I started in a world of RS-232, where every byte that came in the modem appeared on the screen. We networked our two computers together with a cable that swapped pins 2 and 3, and did little else. That’s *easy* to understand. What happens in a modern network.. is a little bit trickier. Yes, there’s still wires for transmit data and wires for receive data – and yes, a ethernet switch isn’t *that* complicated to understand, and neither is a MAC address, and neither is ARP, and neither is TCP and the three cornered handshake and routing and subnet masks and four-quad encoding and collision-based networking and WPA and web 2.0 and RISC in CISC’s clothing and SMP and NDIS and SMB and I could go on for a few hours here.. but there’s *so much*. I know, we learned it, so will they.. but we started from a much, much lower altitude. If we learned to fly a Cessna, these kids are starting out putting their hands on a 747.. I know they’ll succeed, probably go a lot further than we ever did.. but I still feel for them.

It sounds like Ryan is very gifted at giving real world explanations that help form metaphors for what the machines are doing, and in today’s world, that’s a very good thing. As I’ve said before, you two are awesome and my hat is off to you both for what you’re doing, and I wish I had the balls, not to mention the lack of fear of other people.

/Codger mode off.

I’m surprised that more people who buy Aspen, don’t just get birch even though the leaves don’t flutter quite as much.

MDV / Oregon

I was surprised you did not bring it up on Saturday!

“You want to hike the Teton Crest Trail more than you can adequately express”. :0)