> My dad taught me to program in C64 BASIC. Or rather, he dictated a
> program to me, and I'm just the one who typed it in. Later I sat down
> and read the C64 manual from cover to cover. (No mean feat for a kid who
> was nearly illiterate.)

Hehe, I still remember the first program my dad showed me how to type 
in. It was in BBC BASIC and changed the screen mode to a graphics mode 
then drew two lines in the shape of a big "T" on the screen. The rest I 
learned myself by looking at other programs. There was no "draw circle" 
command so I copied a function from another program that did circles. 
For years I only knew sin and cos as those funny functions you use to 
draw a circle.

> We didn't have computers at school. (They /were/ a relatively new
> commercial product, after all.) When they eventually got some, it fell
> to the school's Religious Education teacher (no, seriously) to "teach us
> about computers".

We were a little ahead at my school, we had a specific IT teacher who 
seemed to mostly know his stuff - he often taught people a lesson for 
not logging out by moving all their files somewhere else when they 
weren't looking, most famously to the head of english :-). I got in 
trouble though when I figured out on the Acorn login window after you 
clicked OK it simply wrote a null character to the first letter of your 
password, the rest was still stored in memory, even after you logged 
out! After the IT teacher had logged out I found the location and read 
the bytes... "<NULL>OSSMAN". Nice... Apparently he used the same 
password for lots of accounts so had to change them all :-)

> By this point, I had already moved on from BASIC to Pascal, using both
> Borland's TurboPascal 5.5 for MS-DOS, and on my Amiga Hi-Speed Pascal
> (who's libraries are nearly identical to TurboPascal, despite the rather
> different hardware). So say I knew more than the teacher did would be an
> understatement.

I moved on from BASIC to ARM assembler (which is infinitely easier than 
x86 assembler), it was only once I got a PC that I got a free copy of 
Borland C++ Builder on a coverdisc. Again I pretty much taught myself 
C++ from reading the samples that came on the disc, and maybe I borrowed 
a book or two once from the library.

> (I still recall an incident where I said you shouldn't unplug the
> printer from one machine and into another while both the printer and the
> computers were switched on because it might cause electrical damage. The
> teacher told me that the manual warned you not to unplug the printer
> while the PC is turned on because it might cause physical damage to the
> socket, which is why we always unpluged it from the printer end instead.
> WTF?)

Oh we had plenty of teachers who didn't even know there was an on/off 
switch at the back of the machine. This was probably the first time in 
history where teachers suddenly get a load of kids who know more than 
them about something they are trying to teach!

> These days, I don't feel so smug. In fact, I'm almost beginning to feel
> that the next generation is overtaking *me*. o_O

> What, in the name of God, is an "app"?
>
> Once upon a time, you had the "operating system", which runs the
> machine, and then you had various "application programs" or just
> "applications", which address real-world problem domains.

You answered your own question, app is short for application, it's come 
to be associated with small cheap applications that you download for 
mobile devices though.

> Suppose, for example, that you are somehow so stupendously rich that you
> can not only afford to /buy/ an iPhone but also to pay the bills for it.


phone and pretty much all your calls and data. There are cheaper 
alternatives from competitors like Samsung running Android from as low 

data (eg for just checking email and occasional browsing).

> Through mechanisms which I do not really understand at all [Jesus Christ
> I feel old!], it is apparently somehow possible to access the Internet
> with such a device. (Presumably that's part of why it's so damned
> expensive - along with the obvious fact that it's extremely shiny.)

Ummm, haven't most phones allowed you to do that for some time now?

> Since we're here, I might as well ask: the iPad. Sure, I mean, I know
> what it /is/, but... why? What is it /for/? Can anyone articulate a
> coherent explanation?

If you use a phone a lot to read email and browse the internet then 
you'd probably appreciate the larger screen. The people I know who have 
them are either female or have a female to carry them around for them 
(females generally tend to carry around a bag large enough to fit one 
in). Or if you're used to using a laptop, an iPad is going to be smaller 
and lighter (and boot up much quicker).

Also once you've got used to using multi-touch it's painful to go back 
to a mouse (for things like scrolling and zooming). I still prefer a 
keyboard for typing lots of text, but for web addresses and short emails 
the iPad keyboard is fast enough.

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