A New (Old) Approach for 21st-Century Kids Using Computers: Chronological Order – notes
Posted this on the social networks and got a good response, so getting this on a blog post so I csn revisit it with notes over time … As our kiddo grows older, we’re embarking on a journey together, exploring the evolution of computing—starting from the very beginning and experiencing each stage in chronological order 🖥️ 🧸.
For some systems, we might rely on emulators, but we’re aiming to acquire, build, rebuild, or borrow as many original devices as possible.
The goal is to explore some of the hardware itself, showing how it all worked before computing transformed into sealed black rectangles that are mostly used for shopping or paying for subscription services. And we’ll likely use a Raspberry Pi for many of these systems, depending on what’s feasible for real hardware and emulation. Here’s the planned OS “Playlist” so far…
DEC PDP-11 (1970)
Altair 8800 (1975)
Apple I (1976)
TRS-80 Micro Computer System (1977)
Commodore PET (1977)
Apple II (1977)
Atari 400/800 (1979)
Commodore VIC-20 (1980)
BBC Micro (1981)
IBM PC (1981)
Commodore 64 (1982)
Sinclair ZX Spectrum (1982)
Apple Lisa (1983)
Apple Macintosh (1984)
Tandy 1000 (1984)
Amiga 500 (1987)
IBM AS/400 (1988)
NeXT Computer (1990)
Sun SPARCstation 10 (1992)
BeOS (1995)
Apple iMac G3 (1998)
Silicon Graphics O² (1996)
Others?
It of course would be great to have a video-game-collection-style selection menu of all the OSes, we’ll see what we can do – this could be a neat book, a way to teach computing in classes, or something for computer museums to have.
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