OK, I can hear the sneers. Are these the rants of a grouchy old boomer? Feh, kids today! (And get the #$#*! off my lawn!)
Fact is, I just wanted to give my son a chance to sample some of the wizardry standing behind the curtain, before he became lost in the avatar-filled and glossy-rendered streets of Oz. Like the hero in "TRON," or "The Matrix," I want him to be a user who can see the lines that weave through the fabric of cyberspace -- or at least know some history about where it all came from. At the very minimum, he ought to be able to type those examples in his math books and use the computer the way it was originally designed to be used: to compute.
Hence, imagine my frustration when I discovered that it simply could not be done.
Yes, yes: For three years I have heard all the rationalized answers. No kid should even want BASIC, they say. There are higher-level languages like C++ (Ben is already -- at age 14 -- on page 200 of his self-teaching C++ book!) and yes, there are better education programs like Logo. Hey, what about Visual Basic! Others suggested downloadable versions like q-basic, y-basic, alphabetabasic...
Indeed, I found one that was actually easy to download, easy to turn on, and that simply let us type in some of those little example programs, without demanding that we already be manual-chomping fanatics in order to even get started using the damn thing. Chipmunk Basic for the Macintosh actually started right up and let us have a little clean, algorithmic fun. Extremely limited, but helpful. All of the others, every last one of them, was either too high-level (missing the whole point!) or else far, far too onerous to figure out or use. Certainly not meant to be turn-key usable by any junior high school student. Appeals for help online proved utterly futile.
Until, at last, Ben himself came up with a solution. An elegant solution of startling simplicity. Essentially: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
While trawling through eBay, one day, he came across listings for archaic 1980s-era computers like the Apple II. "Say, Dad, didn't you write your first novel on one of those?" he asked.
"Actually, my second. 'Startide Rising.' On an Apple II with Integer Basic and a serial number in five digits. It got stolen, pity. But my first novel, 'Sundiver,' was written on this clever device called a typewrit --"
"Well, look, Dad. Have you seen what it costs to buy one of those old Apples online, in its original box? Hey, what could we do with it?"
"Huh?" I stared in amazement.
Then, gradually, I realized the practical possibilities.
Let's cut to the chase. We did not wind up buying an Apple II. Instead (for various reasons) we bought a Commodore 64 (in original box) for $25. It arrived in good shape. It took us maybe three minutes to attach an old TV. We flicked the power switch ... and up came a command line. In BASIC.
Uh. Problem solved?
I guess. At least far better than any other thing we've tried!
We are now typing in programs from books, having fun making dots move (and thus knowing why the dots move, at the command of math, and not magic). There are still problems, like getting an operating system to make the 5141c disk drive work right. Most of the old floppies are unreadable. But who cares? (Ben thinks that loading programs to and from tape is so cool. I gurgle and choke remembering my old Sinclair ... but whatever.)
What matters is that we got over a wretched educational barrier. And now Ben can study C++ with a better idea where it all came from. In the nick of time.
Problem solved? Again, at one level.
And yet, can you see the irony? Are any of the masters of the information age even able to see the irony?
This is not just a matter of cheating a generation, telling them to simply be consumers of software, instead of the innovators that their uncles were. No, this goes way beyond that. In medical school, professors insist that students have some knowledge of chemistry and DNA before they are allowed to cut open folks. In architecture, you are at least exposed to some physics.
But in the high-tech, razzle-dazzle world of software? According to the masters of IT, line coding is not a deep-fabric topic worth studying. Not a layer that lies beneath, holding up the world of object-oriented programming. Rather, it is obsolete! Or, at best, something to be done in Bangalore. Or by old guys in their 50s, guaranteeing them job security, the same way that COBOL programmers were all dragged out of retirement and given new cars full of Jolt Cola during the Y2K crisis.
All right, here's a challenge. Get past all the rationalizations. (Because that is what they are.) It would be trivial for Microsoft to provide a version of BASIC that kids could use, whenever they wanted, to type in all those textbook examples. Maybe with some cool tutorial suites to guide them along, plus samples of higher-order tools. It would take up a scintilla of disk space and maybe even encourage many of them to move on up. To (for example) Visual Basic!
Or else, hold a big meeting and choose another lingua franca, so long as it can be universal enough to use in texts, the way that BASIC was.
Instead, we are told that "those textbooks are archaic" and that students should be doing "something else." Only then watch the endless bickering over what that "something else" should be -- with the net result that there is no lingua franca at all, no "basic" language so common that textbook publishers can reliably use it as a pedagogical aide.
The textbook writers and publishers aren't the ones who are obsolete, out-of-touch and wrong. It is people who have yanked the rug out from under teachers and students all across the land.
Let me reiterate. Kids are not doing "something else" other than BASIC. Not millions of them. Not hundreds or tens of thousands of them. Hardly any of them, in fact. It is not their fault. Because some of them, like my son, really want to. But they can't. Not without turning into time travelers, the way we did, by giving up (briefly) on the present and diving into the past. (I also plan to teach him how to change the oil and fix a tire!) By using the tools of a bygone era to learn more about tomorrow.
If this is a test, then Ben and I passed it, ingeniously. In contrast, Microsoft and Apple and all the big-time education-computerizing reformers of the MIT Media Lab are failing, miserably. For all of their high-flown education initiatives (like the "$100 laptop"), they seem bent on providing information consumption devices, not tools that teach creative thinking and technological mastery.
Web access for the poor would be great. But machines that kids out there can understand and program themselves? To those who shape our technical world, the notion remains not just inaccessible, but strangely inconceivable.
About the writer
David Brin is the author of "The Postman" and "The Transparent Society," among other fiction and nonfiction works. His latest novel, "Foundation's Triumph," written at the request of the Isaac Asimov estate, brings to a grand finale Asimov's famed Foundation Universe.
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