6502.org

I agree entirely with you, Garth, in spite of my post above, that students are not learning the ins and outs of the hardware and software. In the UK it is difficult to impossible to find younger engineers who both understand the nitty-gritty and who have actually got their hands dirty doing it... which is why my company requested that I returned part time to work after I retired a couple of years ago.

An interesting thing is that while an electronics degree takes three years to earn, in the real world one uses generally little more than V=IR, P=IV, Vbe = 0.6V, and the frequency equations. Of course, the benefit of the education and forty year's practice is that one knows when to use them, and when you need to reach for Horovitz and Hill (and where to look therein!).

There may be also a theory vs trade barrier: the electronics student may not know which end of a soldering iron is hot, but that's ok because soldering is something for lower-paid wiring contractors... like it or not, inclusive or not, we are the exceptions from the crowd. We grew up at a time when playing with the hardware was something to be encouraged; where there was expertise from elders available (I was taught how to build a crystal radio as a child and still remember Things A Boy Can Do With Electricity with fondness ( https://www.amazon.com/Things-Boy-Can-D ... B0007EROP8 ) and where there was a thriving hobbyist magazine market. And incidentally, soldering and physical debugging has got a *lot* harder, with smaller components in more difficult packaging: fancy hand-soldering BGA with a hotstick? Let's not mention the problems of lead free solder...

These days the encouragement is not there, and I suspect that any inclusion at school (pre-university) is merely to meet some vague idea of a curriculum. The existence and popularity of Youtube channels like Ben Eater, SLU4, The Eight Bit Guy, or Adrian's Digital Cellar (to indicate a few I've seen recently) says that yes, there is interest... but how many of the subscribers to one of those channels actually build something of their own?

And yes, it's all bloody annoying that people don't see the attraction of this as a hobby instead of dunking themselves into social media or playing video games! (And yet, and yet... I fly a paraglider even at my advanced age, and you'd be amazed how many people think I just climb a mountain and jump off).

Pah. I've turned into my father!

Neil ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69a9WOcLPMg )

Ah, the godfather who started me with the cat's whisker treated me to one of those kits

Oddly enough, he was a watchmaker, instrument maker, and clock restorer; when he died his will left me 'everything of a mechanical, optical, electronic, horological, or scientific nature' and since his name was Les Green, the smiley I often use is particularly apposite.

Neil

I saved up my paper route money and bought one of those. I remember walking miles to the Radio Shack to get it because I didn't want my mom to know how much money I spent on it.

What was the "Space-Age IC"? A 741 or a 555 ?

Surely anyone who buys an electronic project kit would expect soldering to be required?

Well, microcontrollers are now designed so you don't need any assembler code whatsoever. If you look at the ARM Cortex-M or AVR, you can write absolutely everything in C.
Even hardware design (at least for digital circuits) is done in a "high-level" language now, like Verilog. Do you need to know how to implement an adder in logic gates? You can just specify an addition in the Verilog and it incorporates a pre-written library function. OK, so somebody has to know how to write the library functions but most don't need to.
Other countries, presumably.
Performance is relevant if you want to be able to do everything in a high-level language - especially an interpreted language where things can take orders of magnitude longer than the same functionality in assembler.

Looking closer I see that's the 1976 catalog. I would have bought one a few years before that. I don't recall mine having an "IC Unit" there in the middle but everything else is laid out as I remember it. But I can't find that there were different versions of that kit.
Here's a better image of the "IC" with a schematic. A bit of a stretch to call it an IC.

Tongue in check I guess. Here's the first kit I bought for my girls. It wasn't until many years later that I bought a soldering kit for them, mostly because my youngest said she should learn how to solder.

I don't see those as advantages.  A 6502 board could be made that small too (actually WDC has some that are less than half that size); but for one thing, this topic is about kits, and no beginner is going to be assembling or probing the tiny SMT stuff with .020" pin pitch or BGAs; and for another, it seems like being so cheap is counterproductive because the user won't value it and put serious time into it.  HLLs, Windows, and USB isolate the student too much from what he should be learning, and whether consciously or not, he knows it, and knows this will never really be his "baby."  He will just be an appliance operator, like I am with my PC.  Do I know how to use it to do the things I need to on it?  Yes, but I lack the knowledge to do anything original with the technology.  It's like my wife driving her car every day with no idea of how any of it works.

enso has a great post about the value in a system where you can truly understand and control its hardware, its software, and its updates, here.  cr1901 wrote, "creating a 65xx computer can give someone a fundamental look at how CPUs get their information to and from the outside world, and that it does not require 500+MHz to do useful work, such as a text editor, I/O device manipulation, and basic math calculations/text manipulation."

Even simple-ish microcontrollers have 200-page data sheets.  In 2021 I had to re-develop something to work on a PIC16 after I had done it a couple of years earlier on my workbench computer with the 65c02.  Even though I had the previous work to go on (which should have made the next round much easier), doing it again for the PIC16 was much, much harder.  IIRC, getting the UART working was the hardest part.  Microchip has a lot of ap notes on operating different onboard peripherals, with working sample code, but there was none for the UART.

Our daughter-in-law graduated at the top of her class at the university in computer science.  This was not computer engineering, and she knows virtually nothing about circuits, interrupts, etc., but rather html, CSS, SQL, database, Java, Javascript, C, C#, C++, Python, and a lot of other things I know virtually nothing about, and she still works for the school in maintaining their website, things like online classes, class scheduling, student enrollment, records, payroll, etc..

As Ed said, there are various stopping-off points.  We need the people like our daughter-in-law above; but we will always also need the ones who know the low-level stuff, unlike her.  To focus on the one at the exclusion of the other is a big mistake.  I recently met a new graduate in computer engineering though, who had taken all the classes in processor design, and I wanted to pick his brain about the design of MMUs, caches, deep pipelines, branch prediction, etc..  He wasn't able to answer any of my questions!  It sure doesn't speak well for what's going on in the schools today.  Maybe all he was taught was how to do drag-and-drop on chip-design software.

There are organizations that supposedly do computer education from grade school through high school, like code.org.  One thing that really stands out to me on code.org is, in the analogy of Formula or CART auto racing, that they expect and promise all the kids that they will be the fast race-car driver.  They seem to ignore the fact that the driver isn't going anywhere unless there are engineers and technicians behind him who are interested in fuel systems, ignition systems, valve timing, aerodynamics, etc., who probably never drive the fast car themselves or even have any interest in actually doing so.  Code.org shows everyone doing the flashy graphics and drag-and-drop.  What goes on under the hood is indispensable, not something to be put in a glass box in a museum; but code.org gives it no attention, at least on the pages and videos I saw there.  They also seem to ignore embedded-control computers that don't use any graphics at all, and may not even have any human I/O.
Sadly, that may be the reality.  I would like to help keep it from being that way though.
I do that stuff in Forth on a 5MHz 65c02.  When I need more performance, it's very easy to mix a little assembly language in.  Assembly language is a lot easier on the 65's than it is on the higher-scale processors.

The bloat and inefficiency of the code that goes into modern high-en processors is indeed staggering though.  In this 9½-minute video posted July 25, 2022, "Programmers Aren't Productive Anymore," apparently an excerpt from a seminar, Jonathan Blow says that all these modern high-level languages (HLLs) are making programmers less productive now, and that the HLLs are failing to deliver the promised benefits.  He says that as we go up the ladder of HLLs, "somewhere through this chain, it becomes wrong."  He does say we don't want to go all the way back to assembly language, because of the lack of abstraction; but I address that criticism in my article on doing program flow-control structures in assembly language through macros, and in other places on my site.  There can be lots of abstraction, with, in most cases, no penalty at all in either in code size or run speed.

Here's another (short) Jonathan Blow video from 2017, about modern bloatware eating up all the benefits we might have gotten from hardware advances:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ka549NNdDk&t=290s
It's cued up to what I think is the most important part which is less than three minutes long.  He's saying that with increased clock speeds, increased memory speeds, larger caches (which should mean fewer cache misses), and more cores, we should be seeing much better performance, yet taking Photoshop as an example, which should be 192 times as fast as it was a couple decades earlier, the reality is that there's been virtually no speed-up.

[Edit, 1/4/24:  I just found out this is called "Wirth's law.  The Wikipedia article starts with, "Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.  The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth, a computer scientist who discussed it in his 1995 article 'A Plea for Lean Software'."]

This is something I noticed even in the late 1980's when a new technology was introduced that improved memory prices and speed a lot in one step, and immediately Microsoft was saying, "This is great because now we don't have to be as careful and we can get new software out faster," and what happened is that the user never got the benefit.  Boot-up took just as long, the "disc full" or "insufficient memory" messages came up just as often, and there were just as many bugs.  Processors also got faster, but bloatware nullified the speed advance.

asveikau, who had been a developer at Microsoft said, "From a certain vantage point, in these languages, if you aren't seeing assembly from time to time, you're not seeing reality."

I'm constantly straining to make software more efficient, powerful, maintainable, etc., and to demonstrate what can be done with simpler hardware; and this is what I would like to se emphasized in early computer education and kits.

As an added benefit, all the layers of abstraction between the hardware and the software writer provide many new and exciting opportunities for even more devastating bugs!

I fear that people who don't like to use a thing unless they understand at least its basic operating fundamentals are a dying breed. In essence, I observe (as others have) that people don't do technology; they do magic.

• Turn on tap, get water. Magic!
• Turn on switch, get light. Magic!
• Turn key, engine starts. Magic!
• Click mouse button, get entertainment. Magic!
• Visit supermarket, find food. Pay with a piece of plastic. Magic!

There is little appreciation by the vast majority of people of how things work; neither the practical principles upon which they operate (wings depend on Bernoulli's principle? Rubbish: try Coanda... (p.s. ask NASA; they should know)) nor the infrastructure required to keep the magic working.

I'm an engineer (though I don't have the right sort of credentials to call myself one here in Germany!): I can build a car from the ground up (and have); I can build a microcontroller/processor system to perform specific tasks on demand (and have); I'm an expert in out-of-date broadcasting systems; I can build a TV or Radio studio; I can fix the leaky pipe of the tap that drips or that circuit that keeps blowing the fuse; I can even put an Ikea kit together! And I suspect that the majority of people who read this have similar abilities; or at least, the ability and interest to learn how to.

But to most of the world; the ones who don't realise that you can't change from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles without doubling the power distribution system; who don't realise how many planes, trains, and trucks are dragging food around so it's there when they get to the supermarket... they don't know and they don't want to know.

Why should they? It's magic. And we're the magicians.

Neil

p.s. and we're all getting older...

Arthur C. Clarkes 3rd law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

-Gordon

Not really.

I had an electronics project kit when I was a young teenager (mid 70s) and there was no soldering. I made radios, alarms, amplifiers and so on. A few years later at school we had electronics kits - and again, no soldering. Today we have solderless breadboards - actually, we had them back in the 70s too - I just couldn't afford them but stripboard was cheap.

But think of 320 solder joints.... At 5 seconds a joint (say), that's about half an hour plus the time to place all components. My own record for soldering them up is 3 in an hour (I made up 20 at one point for a demo) but that was really going for it and placing the components on 3 boards at a time, then soldering that area, etc. It was somewhat mind numbing... Then there was testing ...

And I'm not sure what people actually learn from soldering - it's a physical skill, yes, but does it enhance their appreciation or understanding of electronics or learning to code? I'm not sure.

I look at my Ruby816 board - it's over 250 solder points - the only reason to get it as a kit would be to save some money (and of-course there is the legal issue of selling things ready made vs. kit form - the Pi foundation fell foul of that when they imported the first batch of units, so had to go through the CE, etc. certification process before they could legally sell them). So Ruby then becomes a retro software platform - with the added headache of needing to solder it up, and hope it works before use ... At least Ben Eaters thing is modular and testable in small chunks and the RC2014 system? Small boards on a bus - easier to assemble and test, maybe?

Might as well just emulate it all on a PC...

-Gordon

Soon everything will be replaced by ChatGPT...