commodore 64

What happens when you overclock

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

I’ve never been a big fan of overclocking. I overclocked for a couple of weeks back in my Pentium-75 days but quit when my system started acting goofy. I did it again five years ago when I was writing my book, because, well, everyone expected me to talk about overclocking in it. So I overclocked again, and tried to use that overclocked machine in the process of writing a book. This foray only lasted a little while longer.

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A compelling toy train layout with animations done on the cheap

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Layouts featuring Lionel, American Flyer, and other O or S gauge trains don’t have to be expensive. Joe Rampola has lots of ideas for creating a good-looking layout with lots of animation (aside from the trains) using mostly inexpensive items. His site has lots of pictures and video clips.

His work has been featured in both Classic Toy Trains and O Gauge Railroading magazines.Among his better ideas: Lay a loop of HO gauge track, then put 0-4-0 mechanisms from cheap HO scale locomotives in the frames of 1:43 scale die-cast cars and make streets for the layout. This is a similar approach to K-Line’s new Superstreets, but Rampola did it years earlier, and his approach is a lot less expensive for those who can live without instant gratification. His approach also allows you to use any vehicle you want, so long as you’re willing to modify it.

He also has plans and instructions posted for lots of inexpensive animations he did using the cheap unpainted (and unfortunately, discontinued) K-Line figures from the classic Marx molds of the 1950s. Sometimes you can still get lucky and find a box of unpainted K-Line figures hiding on hobby shop shelves.

He even has his animations controlled by an old Timex Sinclair 1000 computer. He gives enough detail that I suspect someone good with homebrew circuits could adapt his circuit and his program to another computer, such as an Apple or Commodore. Even a 3.5K unexpanded VIC-20 ought to be up to the task, let alone a behemoth Commodore 64.

I’ve always bristled at the thought of adding electronics to my traditional layout, because my trains are my escape from computers. But using a real computer–real men only need 8 bits–to control parts of a layout does have some appeal to me.

The Commodore 64 Direct to TV is out

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , ,

It’s out, and the entire inventory of 250K units was bought by QVC.

So much for getting one of these at Kmart. Anyway, it’s a C64 in a joystick enclosure with 30 games built in, similar to the Atari 2600 and Intellivision units you see in stores.The game selection is a bit disappointing, with an awful lot of obscure titles and, aside from the included Epyx titles, very few big hits. According to the designer, the problem is tracking down the copyright holders of some of these 20-year-old titles in order to get permission to use them.

Two of my all-time favorites are on there: Jumpman Jr. and Pitstop 2. But, alas, no Seven Cities of Gold, no Dig Dug, no Pirates!, no Giana Sisters…

I’d think about getting one, but I’m sure the main appeal would be turning it into a full C64, which is supposed to be possible.

Determining the age of electronic equipment

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Retro Computing , ,

Determining the age of electronic equipment is fairly easy to do. There’s actually a secret code that allows one to do this and gain other insights into the history of such devices. This works for computers, of course, but also for most any other device that contains computer chips.

You just need to know how to read the code. Read more

CompUSA’s $30 house-brand router looks like a rare bargain

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

I just built a network for a friend using CompUSA’s $30 cable/DSL router/4-port switch. I’m not sure if the price was a Memorial Day special, or if that’s the regular price. Considering you can’t get a Linksys or D-Link for under $50 without rebate hassles, and usually they cost closer to $80, that’s a nice deal.
The CompUSA unit looks bland and generic–it’s brown and boxy, from the same design school as the original Commodore 64–but that’s the only knock I have on it. Hide it behind your desk if its homely looks bother you. Installing it was literally a plug-in-and-go affair. Plug in the cable modem, plug in the computers, release the computers’ IP addresses and renew them (or reboot if you wish), and they’re all on the network.

If you want to get fancy, then open the manual. You can do port forwarding, set up a DMZ, and do everything else you’d expect from a consumer router. It even includes dynamic DNS support–something the more expensive units didn’t give you, the last I checked.

I can’t speak for the long-term reliability of the unit, since I literally spent 15 minutes with it. The price is good enough that to me, it’s worth a slight risk. In devices like this, it’s the wall wart that’s most likely to fail anyway.

So if you or a friend is looking to share your cable or DSL broadband connection and there’s a CompUSA nearby, it’s worth a look.

How IBM and DOS came to dominate the industry

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
How IBM and DOS came to dominate the industry

Revisionist historians talk about how MS-DOS standardized computer operating systems and changed the industry. That’s very true. But what they’re ignoring is that there were standards before 1981, and the standards established in 1981 took a number of years to take hold.

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My experience with online dating doesn’t match PC Magazine’s

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , ,

OK, I guess it’s time I come out of hiding and make a confession: I’ve used an online dating service. And, if I found myself single and unattached again, I’d probably do it again.
I don’t know if the stigma around online dating still exists, but the inescapable fact is I’m terribly shy in person, especially with women. But I can write a little and when you read a little bit of what I’ve written, you get to know me pretty well. So the computer allows me to get past that shyness.

I saw the service I used reviewed on PC Magazine’s web site this week. It was pretty critical. Every other review I’ve heard about it gushed. And truth be told, in early September I was gushing pretty nasty things about it. I even told some people to stay away from it. It turned things around after a month. Maybe two. I can’t remember the time frame anymore.

The service is eharmony.com. I got that out of the way. Now let me tell you that if you heard about it on Dr. Dobson, which was the original source I heard about it from second- or third-hand, Dobson was gushing about it. Frankly I don’t care much what Dobson has to say about singlehood. Live 10 years listening to people ask you what’s wrong with you because you don’t have a girlfriend, and then I’ll listen to you. I’m not terribly interested in the opinions of this week’s fifty-something who got married in his early 20s on how to cure the disease called singlehood in the early 21st century. (Since when is it a disease anyway?)

Contrary to what Dobson’s gushing might have you believe, eharmony isn’t a magic bullet. Now don’t get me wrong: It does have potential. When one of my friends called me up all excited about it and he described its process, I was willing to humor him. It starts out with a psychological profile. I remember doing a psychological profile using a program called Mind Prober on a Commodore 64 in the late 1980s. It did a pretty good job of profiling me. It got a few details wrong, but I grew into those. Spooky, huh? So if a computer with 64K of memory, 1 megahertz of processing power, and 340K of available secondary storage could profile me, a modern computer could do just fine so long as the profiling algorithm and data is good. So I believe in computer psychological profiling.

Another part of the idea is that you interview thousands of married couples. Happily married couples who’ve been that way for a very long time. That’s a small percentage of people who get married. Take a large sample set, profile them, and you can eventually get an idea of what personality traits are compatible long-term. Nice theory. I buy that. I’ll definitely take it over guesswork.

PC Magazine expressed doubts over use of science in finding love. Considering the success rate of the traditional methods, I’ll take whatever edge I can get.

Here’s what happened with me.

PC Magazine’s reviewer bemoaned her lack of initial matches. I was the opposite. Christian males seem to be a rarity, or at the very least, highly outnumbered. But I think I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

It started off with a questionaire. It took PC Magazine’s reviewer 45 minutes to fill it out. I’m pretty sure it took me closer to an hour and a half. It’s important to consider the questions carefully and answer honestly. A lot of the questions were things I hadn’t thought about in a long time, if ever. By the time I was done, I felt like eharmony’s computer probably knew me better than most of my closest friends. It was that exhaustive. Some of the questions are about you, and some of them are about what you’re looking for. Again, it’s important to be honest. And specific. And picky. The important questions for me were about faith. I won’t date someone who doesn’t share that with me, period. It understood that. It went so far as to give me a list of denominations and ask which ones were OK and which ones weren’t. I ticked off all of the evangelical-minded denominations, then I ticked Lutheran, just because it felt weird to leave my own out. Then I un-checked Presbyterian, only because the girl who will always have the title of The Ex-Girlfriend was/is Presbyterian. We all have baggage, and that’s some of mine.

The system immediately found four matches. Over the course of 2-3 months (I don’t remember how long I stayed) it would find close to 20. I started exchanging questions with one of them right away. I don’t remember the exact process right now. I know early on you’d read a superficial profile of the person–excerpts from their interview. You’d learn things like where they’re from and how to make them smile. If you’re both interested in talking, you pick from a list of questions to exchange back and forth. The first set is multiple choice. One question I asked everyone, without fail, was “If you were going out to dinner with a friend, what kind of restaurant would you choose?” And there were four answers, ranging from a fancy restaurant to a greasy spoon. I wanted to weed out the snobs, which was why I asked that one. I think you got a second round, where the questions were still canned, but you got to write out your own answers, limited to a couple of paragraphs. (I usually pushed the limit. Surprise!) I don’t recall if there was a third, but if there was, it was a shorter-still number of questions, permitting a longer answer. When you got through that round, you entered “Open Communication,” which is basically e-mail, with no restrictions.

The first girl I talked to was from Defiance, Missouri, which is about 45 minutes northwest of St. Louis proper. As I recall, she was 30 and she worked in sales. She was really interested at first but got pretty cyclical. We’d talk a couple of times one day, then a week might pass. It didn’t pan out–one day I got the notice she’d chosen to close communication to concentrate on other matches. One nice thing about doing this online–rejection’s a lot easier when it’s not in person.

I can’t remember where the next girl I talked to was from. Across the river in Illinois but I don’t remember the town. She was 24 or 25, and worked in banking. We took off like a rocket. The first time we talked on the phone, we talked for three hours or something obnoxious like that. I had serious hopes for this match, until we met in person. Everything right had come out all at once, and then, everything wrong came out all at once. She found out I’m not as good at communicating in person as in writing. And she found out I can be distant. I had some red flags too. She seemed to want to move a lot faster than I would be able to, and there were personality traits that weren’t necessarily bad, but they just weren’t right for me. And I knew I would never live up to the expectations she had for me. I may be smart and I may be a nice guy, but I am still human. I felt pretty bad after this date. I stopped believing in the approach and took a serious look at what other options I might have.

Then along came the girl from Manchester, Missouri. She was a year older than me. She played guitar. She led Bible studies. She was a math teacher by trade. I was enamored before we even started talking. And it started off great. She answered every question with the response I was looking for. We started talking, and I thought we were going great. Then she got cold feet and started to withdraw. We talked on the phone a few times and it was pleasant, but she seemed to be big into rules and guidelines, whereas I’m more interested in learning the rules to follow and understanding them well enough to know when to break them. (The exception being 10 particular rules you never break, which you can find in Exodus.) We went on one double date. Once again I wasn’t as strong of a communicator as in writing, and I got the distinct impression she wasn’t very interested in continuing. I was questioning whether I was myself. I’ve still got her phone number somewhere but it’s been four or five months. I doubt I ever use it.

Meanwhile, the girl from Troy, Illinois came into the picture. She and the girl from Manchester were contemporaries, but the girl from Manchester got the head start. I’m pretty sure it was the guitar. She was a student, age 21. I was concerned about the age gap. That was the only question mark about her. Her answers to my questions were mostly the second-best answers. The questions she chose to ask me puzzled me a bit–I had trouble figuring out what it was she wanted to know about me. (With all of the other girls, it was plain as day what they were trying to find out.) We stumbled into open communication, talked for a while, and I still couldn’t get over that age thing. Finally she asked me, “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but where’s this going? Do I ever get to meet you?”

So we met in Belleville, then went to O’Fallon, had dinner, and drove around O’Fallon for a couple of hours, talking. My eharmony subscription was up for renewal in a week or so. I let it lapse.

I won’t go into specifics because our relationship is half her business, and I don’t make it a habit to go putting other people’s business on my blog. For the first two months we dated, she got irritated with me once. I’m pretty sure that’s a world record. Most people are doing well if they only get irritated me once over a 24-hour period. Lately I screw up once or twice a month. Most couples I know are thrilled with just once or twice a day.

At one point I seriously questioned the relationship, even to the point where if I’d had to make a yes or no decision right then and there I would have ended it. But that’s not unusual and it’s healthy. And I’m used to being on the other end of that every couple of weeks.

The bottom line is, while we surprise each other, most of the surprises are good ones, and the bad surprises generally aren’t huge surprises. For about 25 years, the only women who understood me at all were my mom and my sister. She’s rocketed onto that list, and frankly, they all probably jockey for that #1 spot. Not bad for someone I first met in person in October. I think at this point my biggest complaint about her is that she doesn’t like mushrooms or olives. I’m sure she’s got bigger complaints about me but she keeps coming around anyway, so they can’t be too big.

I’m not going to say that eharmony is the only way to meet someone, and I won’t say it guarantees you’ll meet someone. I know in at least one case I was a girl’s only match, and it couldn’t have felt good when we flopped. It’s not a magic bullet, no matter what anyone says. I had 17 matches at one point and it still took three months to find someone I felt like I should be dating. Roughly a third were interested in me but I wasn’t interested in them, about a third I was interested in but they weren’t interested in me, and about a third had enough interest on both sides that we talked. If you’re looking for a date this week, you won’t find it on eharmony but you might very well find it somewhere else. And eharmony is definitely expensive.

But I was looking for something long-term, and I think I found it.

Like I said earlier, I’d go back. And that says something.

A total blast from the past

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , ,

I don’t remember how I stumbled across it, but textfiles.com tries to collect documents from the classic days of BBSing, which the curator defines as having ended in 1995. I wouldn’t have thought it that recent. I was still BBSing in the summer of ’94, but by the fall of ’94 I’d discovered the Web, and I thought I was the last one to wake up to it.
I’d learned FTP and Gopher when I went to college in 1993, and I’d been using Usenet via local BBSs for even longer, but as everyone knows now, it was the Web that put the Internet on the map. I think a lot of people think the Web is the Internet.

Anyway, before the Internet, hobbyists would take computers, get a phone line, hook up a modem, and see who called. There were usually discussion boards, file transfers, and at least one online multiplayer game. The really big BBSs ran on 386s with hard drives, but an awful lot of the BBSs I called ran on 8-bit computers and stored their data on floppy drives. I remember one board I called used seven or eight floppy drives to give itself a whopping 6 or 7 megs of online storage. It was called The Future BBS, and the sysops’ real names were Rick and Jim (I don’t remember their handles), and it ran on a Commodore 64 or 128 with, ironically, a bunch of drives that dated back to the days of the PET–Commodore had produced some 1-meg drives in the early 80s that would connect to a 64 or 128 if you put an IEEE-488 interface in it. Theirs was a pretty hot setup and probably filled a spare bedroom all by itself for the most part.

It was a very different time.

Well, most of the boards I called were clearinghouses for pirated software. It was casual copying; I didn’t mess with any of that 0-1 day warez stuff. We were curmudgeons; someone would wax nostalgic about how great Zork was and how they didn’t know what happened to their copy, then someone would upload it. I remember on a couple of occasions sysops would move to St. Louis and complain about how St. Louis was the most rampant center of software piracy they’d ever seen, but I see from the files on textfiles.com that probably wasn’t true.

Besides illegal software, a lot of text files floated around. A lot of it was recipes. Some of them were “anarchy” files–how-to guides to creating mayhem. Having lots of them was a status symbol. Most of the files were 20K in length or so (most 8-bit computers didn’t have enough address space for documents much longer than that once you loaded a word processor into memory), and I knew people who had megabytes of them in an era of 170K floppies.

A lot of the stuff on the site is seedy. Seedier than I remember the boards I called being.

But a lot of the content is just random stuff, and some of it dates itself. (Hey, where else was I going to find out that the 1982 song “Pac-Man Fever” was recorded by Buckner & Garcia? Allmusic.com forgot about that song. If I recall correctly, that’s probably proof that God is merciful, but hey.)

Mostly I find it interesting to see what people were talking about 10 and 20 years ago. Some of the issues of yesterday are pretty much unchanged. Some of them just seem bizarre now. Like rumors of weird objects in Diet Pepsi cans.

Actually that doesn’t sound so bizarre. I’m sure there’s an e-mail forward about those in my inbox right now.

Video editing on a shoestring

Dave Farquhar Video , , , , , , ,

When you go to a church like Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in Dayton, Ohio, or St. John’s Lutheran Church in Ellisville, Mo., it’s easy to get overwhelmed with their video productions. They produce slick, professional, grabbing pieces that wouldn’t look out of place on broadcast TV.
Then you go look at their production studios, and feel overwhelmed. I know one of the computers St. John’s uses cost $10,000. That’s not counting the video decks and cameras. You can spend $50,000 to get the stuff you “need” to get serious about making movies.

I don’t have 50 grand and I don’t know anyone who does. If I were getting into this today, these are the things I would buy:

1. Computer. Get an IBM-compatible. All the critical apps for editing are available on PCs, and you can get a PC for next to nothing. Yes, you can edit on an iMac. I wouldn’t want to. At Faith Lutheran Church in Oakville, we edit on a P4 1.5 GHz. I can’t remember if it has 128 or 256 MB of RAM. It does have two 10K RPM SCSI drives. I suggest buying a PC with a gigahertz-plus CPU, DDR memory to be sure (yes, SDRAM is cheap, but speed of memory seems to be more important than quantity–you should be perfectly happy with 256 MB of DDR), and a couple of SCSI drives. Today’s IDE drives are fast enough for pure DV work, but you might not always have DV sources. Use some of the money you save by not buying a Mac to buy SCSI drives. A pair of 36-gig drives was sufficient to produce a 22-minute documentary with room to spare.

Hint: Get your SCSI drives at www.hypermicro.com. Fast delivery, good prices, great customer service. They don’t give me any freebies or any money and I have no affiliation with them. They just have the best prices on SCSI stuff I’ve found.

The budget varies. A $1,000 PC will suffice but you might want more power.

2. Pinnacle DV500. This card is very finicky, so go to www.pinnaclesys.com and look at their installation guides. Buy a motherboard or system they have a guide for. Follow their instructions precisely. I got the DV500 to work on a motherboard Pinnacle didn’t test, but it took me a week.

There are other boards from Matrox and Canopus. The boards look good on paper. I’m not familiar with them. If you compare them with a DV500 and their offerings look better, feel free to get one of them. I haven’t looked, because I was in the market a year ago and at the time the DV500 was the best. I don’t look now because I might be tempted to buy.

Whatever you get, make sure it comes with Adobe Premiere or Sonicfoundry Vegas Video at a minimum. Most boards throw in some titling software and other extras. You want them. Titling isn’t Premiere’s forte. Pinnacle’s titling app is so simple to use, it’s frightening. Remember, Premiere costs mosre on its own than these editing boards, and these boards accelerate some of Premiere’s functions.

I like Premiere but it’s what I leanred. Some people tell me Vegas is easier to learn initially.

The other thing these boards give you, besides acceleration of some video functions, is firewire ports and composite and S-Video inputs and outputs, which you’ll need at the very least for video preview, and for taking video input from analog sources.

Budget $500.

3. Monitors. A dual-head display isn’t a necessity but it’s nice if you can afford to do it. I use a 19-inch NEC Multisync (the model I have is discontinued), and Faith uses the same monitor. A pair of NEC or Mitsubishi monitors would be nice. Get a 19 and a 17 or two 17s if your budget is tight. But we survive just fine on single 19s. Budget at least $200.

A video monitor is a must because your video will look different on TV than it does on your SVGA monitors. A $70 13-inch TV from a local discount house will do fine as long as it has composite inputs, as most do today. I use an old Commodore 1702 monitor (the standard-issue monitor for the Commodore 64) and it’s fabulous, but those are in short supply today. A monitor with S-Video inputs would be nice, but I like to look at my video on lowest-common-denominator equipment. If the device has both types on inputs, hook them both up and check how your work looks both ways. Budget $99.

4. VCR. You’ll need one. The nicer the better, of course, but if all you can afford is a $60 discount house model or a hand-me-down, that’s fine. You’ll be asked for VHS copies of your work, and sometimes you’ll have to use VHS as a source. Budget $75.

5. Camera. I learned on JVC cameras so I’m partial to them. Digital-8 is cheaper, but MiniDV is the emerging standard. If you shop around, you can find a MiniDV camera for under $500, especially if you’re willing to buy a refurb. Nice extras are image stabilization and inputs for an external microphone. You can live without those, but it’s best if you can get them. And you definitely need a tripod. Get one with a fluid head for smooth motion. I bought the cheapest Bogan fluid-head tripod ($130 at a local camera shop) and love it. Budget $650.

6. Lights. Talk to a photographer. We haven’t bought any yet, and it shows.

Assuming you already have a suitable PC and monitor, you can get going for under $1,500. Later, you’ll want to add Adobe AfterEffects and a good sound editor, and more cameras, and more lights, and you’ll work your way towards 50 grand. But the most important thing is to have stories to tell. Tell great stories, and people will find money to fund your video work.

How Linux could own the education market

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How Linux could own the education market. I spent some time yesterday evening working on computers. They were contrasts to the extreme: One, a brand-spankin’ new 1 GHz AMD Duron system with 512MB of RAM and 80 GB of 7200-rpm storage (IDE, unfortunately–but for $800, what do you want?). The other was an elderly AST 486SX/25 running Windows 3.1 belonging to a local teacher who goes to my church.
She teaches kindergarten, and the AST used to be her home computer. When she bought a Compaq Presario a couple of years ago, she took the AST to school. It’s more useful there than in her basement, and there’d be no computer in her classroom if it weren’t for that.

I don’t understand why that is. As much as my sister jokes about it, we don’t exactly live in the ghetto. The school district has money, but it isn’t spending it on computers. Whether that’s a good or bad thing depends on your point of view. The majority of people living in Oakville probably own home computers, so this probably isn’t contributing to the technology gap. But I wonder sometimes how things might have been if I’d been exposed to computers a few years earlier.

I was shocked how much I remembered about Windows 3.1. And I was able to figure out how to get her CD-ROM drive to play music CDs. Don’t ask me how; this was the first I’d messed with Windows 3.1 since 1994 and I’d prefer it stay that way–I was so impressed by Windows 3.1 that I’m one of the 12 people who actually went out and paid money for OS/2. I own actual, retail-box copies of OS/2 2.1, 3.0, and 4.0. And I remember distinctly thinking that her computer has enough memory to run OS/2 at least as well as it runs Windows 3.1…

I also remember distinctly thinking that my employer pays someone $15 a pound to haul better computers than hers away several times a year. We regard 486s as junk; low-end Pentiums may also go out, depending on whether the right person finds out about them beforehand. Usually they work just fine–the problem isn’t the computers, it’s people trying to run Internet Exploiter 6 and Office 2000 on them. They’d run Windows 95 and Office 95 perfectly fine.

But a lot of times we can’t give these old computers away because the licenses for the software that originally came with them are long gone. Old computers are useless without software, so no one would want them anyway.

Now, let me tell you something about kids. Kids don’t care much about the computers they use. As long as there’s software on them, they’ll use them. When I was a kid 20 years ago, I used Radio Shack TRS-80 computers at school. The next year, my family moved, and my new school had Commodore 64s. I couldn’t tell much difference. My next-door neighbor had a Radio Shack Color Computer. They were computers. The Commodores had better graphics, but from a usability standpoint, the biggest difference was where the cartridge slot was so you could change programs. Later on I took a summer class at the local junior college, learning about Apple IIs and IBM PCs. I adjusted smoothly. So did all the other kids in the class. Software was software.

Kids don’t care if the computer they’re using runs Windows or Mac OS or Linux. All they care about is whether there are cool programs to run.

So, businesses throw useless computers away, or they give useless computers to schools so they don’t have to pay someone to haul them away. And schools don’t generally know what to do with obsolete computers that lack software.

Linux won’t run fabulously on old 486s, but Debian with a lightweight window manager like IceWM will run OK. (Let’s face it, Windows 3.1 doesn’t run fabulously on them either–it crashes if you breathe wrong.) I know of a project to clone Oregon Trail on Linux. Great start. How about Sea Route to India? I remember playing that on C-64s at school. It may have been a type-in out of a magazine–I don’t remember where exactly it came from. In these violent times, Artillery might be too controversial, but it taught us early on about angles and forces. Artillery was an ancestor to games like Scorched Earth, but without the heavy-duty nukes. Close wasn’t good enough to win in Artillery. You had to be exact. And no blowing up the mountains between you and your opponents either. You had to figure out how to get over them.

But what about doing homework? By the time I was in the sixth grade, they were teaching us how to use word processors and databases and spreadsheets. AbiWord is a fabulous lightweight word processor. It gives you fonts and spell-checking and good page formatting. (I learned word processing on Bank Street Writer. AbiWord is a far, far cry from that. Frankly, I’d rather write a paper with vi than with Bank Street Writer.) Besides being feature-rich, AbiWord’s been lightning fast on every computer I’ve tried it on. Gnumeric is a nice, fast, capable spreadsheet. I don’t know of a free-form database, but I haven’t looked for one lately either. (I don’t think we need to be trying to teach our 6th graders SQL.)

But what about for younger kids? I remember a program called The Factory. The object was you combined chemicals to make monsters. Different chemicals made different monsters. I seem to remember you played around to see what chemicals would make which heads and torsos and arms. Then the computer started showing you monsters and you had to figure out what chemicals to give it to match them. I also remember a program called Snooper Troops. I don’t remember much else about it, other than it was a mystery and you went around looking for clues, and one of my classmates accidentally formatted the disk one day before any of us had managed to solve it. We couldn’t get the disk replaced, because it was out of print.

And Spinnaker had all sorts of simple titles for younger kids that let them tell stories and other stuff. It seemed cool at the time. But that was almost 20 years ago, so about all I remember was that sailboat logo and some corny theme music.

The other thing about those old days was that the majority of these programs were written in Basic. An ambitious teacher could modify them, to make them easier or harder, or improve the graphics a little. As we got older and learned to program, some of us would try our hand at making changes. You can’t do that anymore with Windows or Macintosh educational titles. Open source can bring all that back too, provided the programs are written in languages like Perl or Python. And it can give cash-strapped schools a way to get computers where kids can use them.

Now I’m wondering what it would take to write something like The Factory in Python…