[Chester LUG] Geeky spot!

[Richard Smedley]

On 25/10/10 15:26, Dan Lynch wrote:
> Get the kids
> learning Bash commands early, that's the future hehe :)

Back in the 90s I gave my 4yr-old daughter an old PC [1]
running a lightweight window manager - however I didn't
use a display manager; she had to log in and type startx
to get the gui up. She also had Emacs for writing stories.

The idea behind this, what some may call wilful cruelty,
was that although she'd probably use a GUI throughout
most of her life, if a computer at any time dropped
her to the command line (if the X-Window-server failed),
or if tech support asked her to open a terminal, she
wouldn't be phased by it, as it would be something every
day.

We should never over-simplify things for kids - simplify
them just enough, and no more :)

 - Richard

[1] It may have been something as fast as a Pentium I.
    I remember running a GUI once on a 486, maxed out
    to 12MB RAM - it wasn't fun :-/