I was recently asked to give a talk to my son’s primary school class about how computers work.
The Powerpoint slides from the talk consist mostly of pictures and towards the end, a small Z80 machine code program (to add a number to itself) for the TEC-1 single board computer.
TEC-1 from Issue 10 of Talking Electronics Magazine cover
My wife and I created a short video showing the program being entered and executed multiple times via the TEC-1’s hex keypad.
As I told the kids during that talk, if you want to understand how a computer really works, you need to get close to the machine-level and talk about processors, memory, buses and so on. So we did, and despite leaving out a lot of details, I think the idea of going from X = X+X to a sequence of simple instructions and a numeric representation palatable to a Z80 made some sense to many of the kids, and at least provided a source of fascination to most. Apart from that, I think it was fun.
We also spent a lot of time talking about the extent to which computers now pervade our lives and how much we take that and the people whose ideas and work made it all possible for granted, including Babbage and Lovelace, Leibniz, Boole, Turing, and so many hardware and software pioneers.
Like many hobbyists in the 70s, 80s and beyond, the idea of building a simple computer from components in a kit was alluring. I’ve been doing paid software development for almost 30 years but was a hobbyist for more than a decade or more before that. I was introduced to the Joy of Computing in Year 10 due to the purchase of a PDP-11/04 by my school (Norwood High in Adelaide) in the late 70s. Along with a love of astronomy that continues to this day, I maintained an interest in programming throughout the 80s, during which time I was a nurse. I eventually decided to convert one of my hobbies into a profession, but still maintain the attitude of a hobbyist, developing open source software such as my current project: VStar.
My hope is that I’ve instilled in at least some of those kids a hunger to know more about computers and programming.