Well we were all kids once. when i was a kid, someone gave me an IBM portable 5155 in 1996/1997 time period. I was in the 5th grade. Well of course electronics oriented that i am, i fell in love with it. tore it apart and put it together to figure out what made it tick. then of course i got DOS manuals and all that fun stuff and thats how i got started. thats how i know DOS, and computers as they are today. all about evolution. in my case, i always figured starting you off with something very old/outdated allows a person to grow into someone that is extremely tech savvy as she/he evolves into the most modern stuff, like I did. as i now have a core i7 machine when it first came out. Any concepts/knowledge/tricks of the trade learned from the early machines and operating systems is still used today, and your much better off.
i feel if i was introduced into a more modern machine as my first computer, i would have no experience with the past machines and how things evolved from then to what they are now, and i would be "dumber" with operating systems. I also have a very strong knowledge of computer hardware and how things work from evolution of the computer from the first one i had till now. Heck, I am a novice software programmer and ASM level microcontroller programmer. But i feel i wouldn't be in this position without knowledge of how things worked in the early days. All this self-taught of course.
Just an example: I put my macintosh LC to use by writing custom software that uses the serial port that monitors a control system that i built with a microcontroller. I have a "weather station" outside the house that reads wind speed, wind direction, relative humidity, barometric pressure, and temperature. this of course is transmitted via a cheap chinese AM transmitter modulator running at 450mhz. receiver is at the macintosh serial port, where the software program reports back the readings. This is just an example of what i have put macintoshes to use for...
Another example: I used an early PPC machine as a central gate operator controller. Built a microcontroller-based keypad that communicates with the mac via serial port. mac has software application that reads the code entered at the keypad, verifies it with known account information stored in a PHP/HTTP based server, and returns a success or fail to the keypad to open up the gate. worked beautiful and it still works to this day. I didnt know if an apache/mysql/php existed for the early PPC macintosh for OS8 or i would have kept it strictly macintosh based. but i had to use a macintosh/PC pair for it all to work correctly. I think i used a PPC 7100/120 as it had ethernet and stuff.
Thats my 2 cents.
i feel if i was introduced into a more modern machine as my first computer, i would have no experience with the past machines and how things evolved from then to what they are now, and i would be "dumber" with operating systems. I also have a very strong knowledge of computer hardware and how things work from evolution of the computer from the first one i had till now. Heck, I am a novice software programmer and ASM level microcontroller programmer. But i feel i wouldn't be in this position without knowledge of how things worked in the early days. All this self-taught of course.
Just an example: I put my macintosh LC to use by writing custom software that uses the serial port that monitors a control system that i built with a microcontroller. I have a "weather station" outside the house that reads wind speed, wind direction, relative humidity, barometric pressure, and temperature. this of course is transmitted via a cheap chinese AM transmitter modulator running at 450mhz. receiver is at the macintosh serial port, where the software program reports back the readings. This is just an example of what i have put macintoshes to use for...
Another example: I used an early PPC machine as a central gate operator controller. Built a microcontroller-based keypad that communicates with the mac via serial port. mac has software application that reads the code entered at the keypad, verifies it with known account information stored in a PHP/HTTP based server, and returns a success or fail to the keypad to open up the gate. worked beautiful and it still works to this day. I didnt know if an apache/mysql/php existed for the early PPC macintosh for OS8 or i would have kept it strictly macintosh based. but i had to use a macintosh/PC pair for it all to work correctly. I think i used a PPC 7100/120 as it had ethernet and stuff.
Thats my 2 cents.