Opening up the Box for our Youth and Future

I think it's important that people have the freedom to open up any 'box' they purchase and understand how it works, modify it, and do something new and creative with it. When you lose the ability to change the way something works, you put yourself at an extreme disadvantage.

For example, a Pak 'n-Sav in Hamilton opened on Good Friday... with no employees present. Someone forgot to program the building not to turn on the lights or open the doors as it does normally each day.

Apple II

When I was is school, it was actually mandatory that we learn to program computers. We had a computer lab with a bunch of Apple II machines with green screens. We'd write some simple BASIC programs that had a number in front of each line to control the order of the commands and which one to GOTO next.

GO TO '10'

In college, one of my professors designed a programming language he named after Bacchi which was laid out visually using a mouse. It generated computer code suitable compilation into programs. Fairly novel back in 1994, but it appears we have evolved.

Nowadays, a waterbear isn't just an small animal popular with scientists in labs, it's also a new visual programming language. It just runs in any HTML5 compliant web browser (basically anything pretty recent). You can try it out at waterbearlang.com

So great, now we have a visual language that we can write scripts to run on the web, but what about getting underneath the hood and understanding how to write something more complex. How about giving cheap computers away that can fit on your keychain?

The lead guy over at the software company Frontier Games has designed a new small computer that will cost around $15-25 and can be given away to students to help them learn how computers work. It will probably run Ubuntu and it sounds like we are about 12 weeks away from seeing them on the market.

HDMI/TV out on the left, keyboard on the right. Computer in the middle.

But for the short term, we have some free training next week from some folks that know a bit about programming. Google has a programming event  in San Francisco that you can attend via the net for free next week. They often reveal new technology that may affect the future as we know it.

It's our future. What will we make of it?

I say we start with open minds and boxes.


ps. I'm looking for work in the Tauranga area. If you are a technology company please send me an email or call/txt me at 022-077-5899.